then you should get a good lower dba fans. i heard samsung hdd is quieter than most brand, not sure if that true.
Get lower fan speed is one thing, still need to run them at 5V. WD has some of the quietest drives now. SE16 and GP drives are all fairly quiet. In fact, heatsink-less Velociraptor is quiet at idle too.
But people like me overlooked the 'reliability' that I did not backup on time. Last year I almost finished my moral project (SPM), took all the pictures, but then the HDD died, I bought a new HDD and had to 'reenact' those old photos that I took. Worst is that I sent my HDD to a 'friend' of my brother who claimed that he can repair it. After passing him the HDD, it seems like it too forever to get back my 40GB PATA, after much long of nagging, he gave me back a 20GB PATA which is not mine, then he took it back and gave me back my 40GB PATA. But when I went in, all my files were gone, except for XP OS. I called him up to ask why, he said the 'installation of XP' was a 'value added service'. I did not want the HDD, I want the files yet he deleted it. So I googled for some HDD file recovery softwares hopefully I can recover a part of what I lost. To my surprised, the files were totally not mine as if they were used by someone else, there were some downloaded movies and of course some slightly intimate photos take between a guy and his gf
Actually, to make thing worse My brother's friend claimed that he sent the HDD to 'another friend' to fix it lolz