2.5" VR 10k Drives are very quiet. In fact I can barely hear them unless they are seeking.
And their Access times are head and shoulders better than any 7200rpm drive i've tried.
The 2.5" SAS 15k rpm drives I use (at work) are not extremely loud either, if you ask me WD should have started by slapping a SATAII / NCQ interface on a 15k RPM 2.5" mechanicals and sold that as a stop gap instead of the VR.
6ms access times would have dropped to about 4ms and you'd probably be doing burst reads @ the capped bandwidth of SATAII and sustained not too far behind.
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