A silent pc laptop

[unguitar]

Hi,
I use a hardware/pedals/software setup to play live and I often play with acoustic ensembles so I need my laptop to be very silent.
I see that new laptops' prices have dropped while offering very powerful machines with dedicated video ram, lots of ram, fast processors and so on.
I would like to consider to buy a stock one so the thing that bothers me the most is to get one which has a very silent hard drive.

What should I look for as a hd specification to identify a silent hd ?

Or, any specific brand/model to suggest ?

thanks,
Luca

[kingmetal]

most laptop hard drives that I've run into these days are virtually silent but I can vouch for Seagate stuff specifically.

however I suspect that you are just not exactly clear on what component of a computer makes it loud or not -- the system fan is the loudest thing in a modern laptop and that will vary greatly from model to model. I'd just troll reviews of machines that you're interested in, as often times reviewers will mention how loud a laptop is.

[unguitar]

you are right, I have been talking about the hd while there could be more causes to noise.
system fan is for sure one of those.
Anyway, I don't care about which could be causing noise, I just care of whatever noise there could be during use.
Therefore any consideration is muchly appreciated.

[Snarl 12/8]

I can't tell when my daughter's Asus laptop is on. It's the quad core with dedicated graphics.

[cdixon6]

If you are looking for silent, go for the solid state drives. I run a Thinkpad T400 with the 1.5 GhZ Core 2, no external graphics. With the power mode set to energy star or power saver(which essentially shuts down one of the processors.. I think) the fan never (ever) turns on. Now running at full speed while recording the fan is bound to kick in but still the fan is pretty quiet.

[kingmetal]

If you are looking for silent, go for the solid state drives. I run a Thinkpad T400 with the 1.5 GhZ Core 2, no external graphics. With the power mode set to energy star or power saver(which essentially shuts down one of the processors.. I think) the fan never (ever) turns on. Now running at full speed while recording the fan is bound to kick in but still the fan is pretty quiet.

SSDs are silent, but modern laptop hard drives make very little noise. I literally cannot imagine a time when you would hear the hard disk on a recording with a modern laptop hard drive.

[LazarusLong]

sometimes on lesser machines, you can have the hard drive whine bleed into the audio and/or make some subtle but noticeable sounds. If you get something other than the cheapest of the cheap laptops, that's not an issue really.