Among the things I love about my unibody MacBook is the barely audible whisper of its 160 GB, 5400 RPM Hitachi HDD shrouded in solid carved aluminum that makes it the most blessedly silent personal computer I’ve ever owned. It easily beats the previous high water mark set by my commendably quiet 700 MHz G3 iBook with its 20 GB IBM/Hitachi HDD. Of course a solid state drive would be quieter still, but I’m not yet convinced that the SSD’s higher cost, lower capacity, and unproven reliability over the long haul make it a satisfactory alternative to time-proven and relatively inexpensive electromechanical hard disk drive technology. This is the history of my personal quest for the most silent computing experience possible on a Mac. It’s been a long and winding (and somewhat circular) road, but recent developments definitely give me hope for the future. The Quietest Of Computers The Hitachi HDD in my MacBook emits a sound so subtle that virtually any amount of ambient noise drowns it out. I’m a big fan of silence, and certain Mac notebooks have been among the quietest of computers. The first Macs — the 128k and the 512k, had no hard drives and were convection cooled, so were very quiet. My first Mac was a Mac Plus, also convection cooled, but had an external hard drive (a bulky 20 MB Seagate unit) that made a tiresome racket. You could boot and run the Mac Plus from a floppy as well, which I used to do when all I needed was a typing platform. The Mac Plus in this mode wasn’t completely silent. The floppy drive would grunt and click periodically, and early Mac keyboards were very noisy, but at least when you stopped to think or read the noise stopped too. Running Off A RAM Disk My most silent computing came when I bought my first PowerBook, a 5300. No fan, a relatively subdued hard drive, but even better — you could turn the hard drive down and work from a RAM disk. Even though I only had 24 MB of RAM in that machine, that was plenty for a slimmed-down OS 7.5.2, a minimum installation of Word 5.1, Globalfax software, and whatever documents were on the go at the time.
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An Apple is Best Seen and Not Heard: My Quest For Quiet Computing
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