Help required on dipping my toe in the music server arena!

[Anonymous]

That depends largely on the cooling. Some brands are whisper quiet, others seem to run their fans all day long.

Anything that uses an array of hard disks is going to be noisy, whereas a single external drive will probably be much quieter. The noise you describe coming from your Dell does seem a touch unusual, to be honest, but then again I'm not familiar with the brand. Of the IBM, Toshibas and no-name laptops I've had, noise has never been a problem.

 

[Anonymous]

My Dell laptop doesn't whistle, but likes to spin its drive and fans a bit, whereas the Mac Mini is close to silent.

 

[Anonymous]

Thecus RAID: Battle of the Nile

iMac: almost silent

Mac Mini: almost silentÿ

 

[Anonymous]

I find that the iMac made a bit more noise than my Mini because it seems to vibrate more against the wooden TV cabinet.

 

[cram]

Me

• NAS Drive - won't have it in the same room as anything I'm watching/listening
• Mac Pro - very quiet
• PC in Antec Case - very quiet
• Dell Lattitude Laptop - occasional fan spinning but largely quiet.

 

[idc]

The noise I am hearing is not the fan (which has just been running very quietly for the past 30 seconds) but it definitely from the laptop and there is no apparent fault with it. It has made that noise since we got it, our other Dell does it as well. It is enough to keep me from having the laptop as the direct source for music and why I use my ipod instead. I know that I could eventually use wireless like Apple Express, but that is not practical with our house setup at the moment. Oh well, must be my ears, thanks for the responses.

 

[PJPro]

For me, it's not the fan that's the issue....it's HDD activity as the AV trawls through the files looking for viruses etc.

 

[Anonymous]

What antivirus software do you use? I usually do a full scan only if something is reported, the rest is done in memory, usually, before disk writes, during downloads etc., so your disk shouldn't be reading/writing all the time.

If you're using RAID, however, it's a different story, as the striping has to be rebuilt almost constantly, which is why the fans are on far more than for a single disk to dissipate the heat.

Also, of course, if your disk is full and needs defragging, it causes more read/writes.

There's also the question of memory, because the less you have, the more windows uses the swap file.