From: Paul Rubin (phr_at_netcom.com)
Date: Thu Jul 01 1999 - 01:29:00 EDT
Forget finding a really quiet hard disk drive. Generally, physically
smaller drives are quieter; 3.5" drives are quieter than 5.25" drives,
2.5" drives are quieter than 3.5", etc. I haven't even found a 1.8"
PCMCIA drive that wasn't annoyingly loud in a quiet bedroom in the
middle of the night.
I've bitten the bullet and gotten the quietest drive of them all, a
totally silent 160 MB Viking PCMCIA type II flash card (about $350 now).
The idea is to use it as working storage: basic Linux OS and
utilities, Emacs, a web browser, and a few other things, plus some
user files. Less frequently used stuff would go on the hard drive
which I'd occasionally have to spin up and access. Unfortunately I
haven't gotten this scheme to work because of PCMCIA problems with the
Viking card on my 770 (it reports itself as the wrong kind of card)
and Viking tech support hasn't been much help. I will have to
reproduce the problem under Windoze 95 before I can get them to do
something about it, and I haven't had time for that.
I've used one flash-drive computer before (HP Omnibook 300 with 10 MB card)
and loved it. The flash card beats the heck out of a hard drive.
Rotating storage seems like a decaying monstrosity, like CRT monitors.
Flash drives with 320 MB are available now and 1 GB drives will probably
be available by the end of the year ($$$$$$). I believe that with some
discipline in resisting code bloat, 160 MB is enough for most purposes.
So I'm really hoping to get this working soon. Maybe I can work on it
a bit more this weekend.
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