Hard drives

It appears to be pretty well established that the fewer number of platters, the lower the power and noise (with obviously significant variation between drives families and vendors). But since we're speaking in generalities, Western Digital's SE16 series appears to have a very good trade-off between noise, power, and throughput/access time. Possibly an even better trade-off than their new GP (green power) series make, where performance appears to suffer. The Spinpoint F1 uses just a bit more power, but has considerably better performance.

WD2500KS has 2x125 GB platters
WD2500AAKS has 2x160 GB platters - 3 heads $50 on ebay. A bit more retail

WD3200AAKS has 2x160 GB platters

WD4000KS has 4x125 GB platters
WD4000AAKS has 3x166 GB platters - 5 heads

WD5000KS has 4x125 GB platters
WD5000YS has 4x125 GB platters
WD5000AAKS has 3x166 GB platters - 6 heads $100

WD7500AAKS has 4x188 GB platters - 8 heads $150

Speaking of WD, it has different seek modes which further tradeoff access time vs. noise (and probably to a lessor degree, power): AAM, which may not work on ASUS boards due to conflicts with A.I. Quiet (fan control stuff?)?! Normally it can be adjusted with HFT (Hitachi Feature Tool), Abacus HDD Acoustic Manager (hddacman), or HDDScan. Maybe just need to do the adjustment on a different motherboard.

Prices are December 2007. Wonder how long it will take 1 TB drives to be $100!