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Old 31st January 2009
DrJ DrJ is offline
ISO Quartermaster
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
Posts: 507
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Lots of new posts!

On the grommet comment: in the old days, hard drives were mounted with screws directly into the case. The issue is that hard drives vibrate, and the small drive vibration is coupled through the mounting to the rest of the case. The large flat sides are wonderful resonators. Consequently, the amount of noise the computer makes goes way up.

This bothers me a lot. I like silent computers. Not everyone cares about this, but if you do, you should look to minimize case vibrations induced by the hard drives. One way to do that is to screw the drive to the case (or drive sled) through a flexible grommet. That lessens the amount of vibration that reaches the case. A more extreme, and very effective method, is to suspend the drive with elastic bands. The Solo models derived from the P150 do this, and it works very well. (They also have the soft grommet mounting method too.) The Antec you cited doesn't have suspension, but does have soft mounting.

I've used both the 520W Corsair (made by Seasonic) and the 500W Antec (I don't recall who made this one for Antec). I really like the Corsair. Solid, quiet, detachable cables, and very stable. The 500W performs well enough, but makes an odd noise (coil whine) that is irritating. I probably could have had it replaced, as this is a common power supply defect. I didn't, because the noise did not bother my customer (my wife). They have the reputation for being decent supplies for the price. This one also has fixed cables that you have to put somewhere, so it is less convenient to work with.

So I think either would be fine, but I personally would go for the Corsair. It should add that it has been about a year since I've looked in detail at power supplies, and like disks, the model line-up and the OEM changes. Personally I'd avoid CWT (Channelwell) as an OEM -- not that there is anything wrong with them, I just prefer the Seasonic-derived units overall.

The Solo case you cite is derived from the first case designed expressly for quiet operation. It is fine, and you can often find them on sale for a good price. It has side-mounted drives: if you have the case open, the drives on their sleds pull out towards you, instead of to the back of the case or out the front. That's a nice feature (I have a similar layout on three computers in different cases), but honestly I don't pull drives that often. The rest is OK, and if you like the looks of it, you can build a quiet computer using it. I've just preferred the P150-derived series; I think it looks better, does not have a front door covering the CDs, and it has the drive suspension system.

Antec does often give very good prices on their combined case/power supply packages, so you may well save quite some money going this route.

My observation about SATA drives recently has been that Seagate does not perform quite as well as its competition, but has had longer warranties and some people claim that their error checking is better. Most of my drives are still SCSIs, so I don't follow the SATA drive market that closely. But do trust techreport -- they are very good. So is Vermaden.

Oh, and the PATA DVD-RW I bought seven years ago is still working fine, as is the one I bought 5 years ago. Both have been used heavily, and show no signs of failing.

Rather than despairing over all of the hardware choices, you should rejoice! There are a lot of fine options available to craft a system exactly as you want. This does take some work, but the upside is that you will get a system that is fast, reliable, quiet and will last a long time. You should also be able to overclock you CPUs with the heat sink you are using to get performance that will be comparable to a prebuilt unit at about the same price. What's not to like?
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