External USB HDD

I'm looking for an external HDD to use with my laptop. Key citeria: Lots of storage, silent operation, cool operation. Exactly the stuff you'd want if you left your laptop running all night long for extended periods of time just to check /. each morning just after you've woken up ... you get the point. Furthermore, no irritating lights, please! My room is already illuminated brightly enough by dozens of erratically blinking LEDs from diverse networking and telecommunication equipment (luckily enough, I've been able to avoid glaring blue LEDs so far) as well as life-support systems (I just NEED coffee). Ideally, an adjustable illumination would be great, so I can have 70's Italo Disco when I want to wake up and nothing but darkness when I want to sleep.
Perhaps the most important point of all: The price tag. EUR 100 to EUR 120 is what I'm willing to pay for.
I'd be glad if the equipment I'm about and willing to buy featured some longer-than-1-year warranty. HDD makers usually offering 3 to 5 years and then sticking to just one on their external products don't really get my trust in terms of reliability--the products might be quiet and cheap, but this just destroys the drives due to lack of decent cooling.

I've looked at several products so far, but the competition is amazing, so I've got no clue where to start.
I'm not fixed on pre-built drives, as I--lo and behold!--posess a series of screwdrivers ALL ON MY OWN and I am WILLING TO USE THEM! Ahem.

Seagate's FreeAgent (orange!) Desktop series seems to look nice, apart from the incredibly ugly design (which is not of great concern, anyway), featuring a 5-year warranty and no obvious screaming miniature fans. The 500 GiB model is just about 120 Euros. Does anyone know if it's really quiet and cool? Can the lighting be turned off?

Alternative suggestions are very welcome!

2.5" is good for noise and heat, bad for speed, size and price.  I like the tradeoff simply for the bus-power. Separate enclosure/bare drive combos are cheapish and give the full warranty.  The LED circuit is pretty much hardwired into the ATA bus, no software hack is going to allow you to turn it off. And even if you could, it is obscured by a usb asic that wont be changable either. Unless you pull out the solder iron, add a pic/avr + a second serial line and void the warranty, you're stuck with the light.

I'm going to leave it connected to my docking station, so not having bus power won't be of any concern.
As there are literally millions of products on the market, I'd need some recommendations on what exactly to buy.

A piece of black electrical tape over the LED should be good enough to stop the glare.  I'm noticing these cases are largely being made to be perfectly smooth, like large lozenges, for appeal reasons, so the tape should work well.  What else should work well are those "Made for Windows XP" metallized stickers on computers these days, which are over 1-sq-cm in area.  Take off one of those from your computer and slap it over the LED on the UDB drive; it'll be durable and will "fit in" better than black tape.

There are a gazillion (not "literally millions") products which will suffice.  Go to Best Buy or Fry's or some other, minimum-margin retailer and take a look at the 2.5" USB drives on their shelves.

>>4
As I want to combine virtually always-on operation with minimal noise and decent cooling whilst having a large capacity at a decent price, buying just something is not an option. It definitely needs to be a 3.5" drive for reasons of capacity.
Of course, there are methods for stoping stupid illumination, but, if avoidable, I'd rather not have it in the first place.

Basically, I'm looking for first-hand experience with external drives or enclosures which could be recommended for my purpose. Reading the oh-so-many reviews of these products says nothing, as the most important factors--noise and temperature--are often not taken into consideration.

I know the best compromise between noise and temperature is using 2.5" drives, but this is not an option, since they lack the needed capacity and are just too expensive. They're great on the go, but if I'd need a drive on the go, I'd slap one into the Ultrabay.

I'll try to help you as far as I can, but there are a few things you need to do.

If you require the 3.5" form due to capacity needs, then there's a certain level of heat and sound you're going to have to accept.

Naturally, we can minimize those.  For heat, use an aluminum case, and the more "finny", the better.  For sound, well, I've found that there's little telling until you run the drive.  Go to a local computer retailer and ask to have them plug in a prospective drive in-store to see how quiet it is.  A place like Best Buy has a service section that has computers already open and ready for such stuff, but I don't know their policies on opening shrink-wrapped packages just to test the drive's sound.

Drives probably have sound ratings.  You'll have to do your own research on that one.  If you know an existing drive that is quiet or loud, google its specs to get an idea of what dB it's rated at.  I believe that OSHA might require that all parts like that have a sound rating, and MIL SPEC might place an additional requirement.

A final note about illumination:  If you're going to put the drive into the enclosure yourself, stopping LEDery should be trivial.

Let us know how you fare.  I've been bothered by noisy hard drives before (I had an IDE 10GB drive that was ungodly!) and I'm interested in what you conclude.

>>4
>>6
Saem fag!!!!!!!1

OP is gay. he doesnt like Blue LED's!!! WHO DOESNT FUKKIN LIKE BLUE LED's?!!?!?!?!?!?!

#8, perhaps if we taped a blue LED to each of your eyelids, you'd start to see why LED-overexposure may not be so desirable.

>>8
If I'm not feeling extremely bad, I prefer sleeping when it's dark without having lights glaring my eyes.

>>6
I'm living in a small to medium sized town (~45K) in Germany featuring a plethora (read: one) of overexpensive electronics retailers with a product selection that makes you cringe.
The other towns or small cities in the vincinity don't look anything better.

Of course, I could just buy a product that looks okay from amazon, try it and if I don't like it, send it back (by German law, there's a 14-day trial period for products you bought over the internet, telephone or mail-order), but this is not only a big hassle, but also somehow stupid.
Be it as it may, I'll have to get the stuff online, as S+H costs are far less than actually buying it here.

As for compromizing noise for capacity, this is totally okay in this case. I've had fairly bad experience with poorly cooled drives, so heat is an issue, too.
The pre-built boxes only feature a one-year warranty, making me figure they're literally roasting their drives inside, praying they'll fail not before one year in operation ... great.

The external cases to put a decent HDD in I've come across so far on my quest to find the best solution are either ridiculously expensive or these extremely cheap things where they would even have made the wires from plastic if this were possible.
Other cases include the perforated-side models from raidsonic and their respective ripoffs, which I'm not too keen buying--cooling might be nice, but noise-wise, it's just like having the drive sit directly in front of you (I know this first-hand, as some of my friends have these cases--they're not bad for the occasional user or the noise-ignorant folks, but they're just too noisy for me).
So far, I haven't found anything with big aluminum fins on the side promising great cooling and low noise (this is, in fact, what I was looking for before I opened this thread, but because I couldn't find any, I figured this just didn't exist)--as you mentioned this,  do you maybe know some models meeting these criteria?

As for the drive to put inside, I'd get a Seagate or Samsung--500 GiB seems to be a nice capacity.

>>10
ORLY?

>>11
YA RLY.

At this point, I don't have any more information for you.  Keep googling, I suppose.

I'm the kind of guy who keeps old cooling-fin units around for laughs, so if I ran into a portable drive that got too hot in its aluminum case, I'd bolt some of these fins to it.  Thermal paste is also fairly cheap.  All that may not help you, alas.

'I'm the kind of guy who keeps old cooling-fin units around for laughs'
You must be the life of the party!!!1

Yeh, you bet, #14.  I know about 7 things you can do with cooling fins that really break the ice at parties.

I collect various HSF combinations as well as fans, so I know quite a bit about cooling, but I'm still looking for an external drive.

I use a Bytecc '3.5" HDD Aluminum Smart Drive Enclosure', but that contains a flashing LED and the OP didn't want any more of that shit goin' on in his life.

Haven't you ever played 4chanbo?  BUMP COVERS SPAM.

the question still persists.

Okay, you said appearance isn't very important.

Buy an enclosure-less SATA/PATA to USB adapter cable for $15 USD and use any internal hard drive you want, sitting on your desk bare-to-the-air, with no active cooling.  Mine came with a 3.5" to 2.5" ATA/power adapter as well, so I can go between desktop and laptop drives easily.  Swap drives in 5 seconds instead of 30.  No lights.  You can even use the adapter to connect an internally-mounted hard drive via USB if your existing drive controllers are full and you can't (or don't want to) add more.

I was the only one using these in my IT dept. at my last job when everyone else was wasting time with enclosures, thumb drives, or shutting down and going straight to the motherboard.  By the time I quit to work at a better job, everyone else had req'd their own.

As a bonus, these adapters come with portable AC-to-Molex power supplies (5V + 12V) that you can use for other things when not using the adapter.  I repurposed one of these to daisy-chain a few silent 120 mm fans at the back of my home theater rack, to draw heat away from some of my hotter equipment.

One more thing you could do (if you really needed an enclosure-like system with active cooling) is to use one of these adapters in conjunction with a removable drive rack.  I have done this with the FMI aluminum racks and trays that CompUSA sells.  The stock fans on these particular units are loud, but can be replaced with Scythe Mini Kaze 40 mm fans (or the equivalent silent Papst fan that might be better available in Europe) for better noise and cooling.  Anyway, the advantage with this is that you can buy additional trays and put each of your drives in its own tray for quick swapping.

Lastly, as for drives, a HD501LJ will be quiet enough without the slight noise dampening that an enclosure would provide.  Bare on the desk would work great.  Just make sure that, if you go with an enclosure-less adapter, the adapter is SATA-compatible.   Older ones, such as the first one I ever bought, aren't.

>>20
One more thing.  If you want to avoid noise due to vibration against your desk, put the bare drive on top of a mousepad, paperback, or sheet of foam.  You shouldn't have to worry about the exposed chipset on any drive; the real heat comes from the moving parts.  That heat will radiate just fine outside of a PC case or enclosure. 

I wonder if anyone's made use of those stereo amp enclosures, which are thick aluminum with gorgeous fins for shedding heat.  #20/21's advice could be use in tandem, if you require an enclosure, but that takes more modding work to be sure.

looking for a bento box?

>>22
I wish you would make good use of a gun and become an hero.
You are not part of anonymous, therefore not part of 4chan.
Bai.

Considering when I come back to the thread, chanfag#24, and see that my words REMAIN here, then I'd have to say that I'm a part of 4chan and that you're also full of fucking shit.

>>25
You are just a stewpid namefag and you are only still here becoz people want to look at you and laugh at you and hate you and stuff. You shuld juts go and do'nt ever come back ok?

Chris Hanssen, don't force me to post more pr0n shots from various security camera clips of your mouth being raped by huge Arab penises in the various quickie marts that you frequent.

>>27
OK this is just getting unaceptable now, you have to stop posting those pictures of me because I am not gay and I am offended by them. I will be contacting my local law enforcement agency and they will be putting a stop to this once and for all. Look forward to being banned from the whole intrenet!

BUMP FOR MORE FRUSTRATION FROM CHRIS(SY).

>>29
Stop calling me that rediculous name right now! That is what makes me sick on these interntrets and don't think for a second that it will go unoticed by the administration. You are really in for the shock of your life soon when you get an email saying you are banned and you can't use the intrentres anymoar.

Certes, Chris(sy) is imploding.  Let's push him over the gayedge, until he fucking CUTS HIMSELF ... cuts himself TO DEATH.

Well I am not a "Chris(sy)" You have no right to call me that if I ask a reasonable request. This site should have some rules about harrassments, threats, and name calling. I am still in the need of more help in that regards. I will do it. I will contact the administration if you mean people dont leave me alone and show me the dignity and respect I deserve.

I will do it.
Do it, faggot!

At least I know now that Chris(sy) isn't Human and can't actually suicide.  It's a roughly 130-line Perl script that I surmise was created in the depths of the Fox News HQ media lab (1211 Ave of the Americas, New York NY 10036).  It could have been created anytime after 2002; so, in a sense, Hanssen is only about 5 years old (not that it has that kind of "memory").