Silence in the living room

If you ever used or planing to use a computer or an old no-longer-in-use computer in your living room as a media center (HTPC), you know silence of the machine is a big factor. You don't want anything that sounds like it could take off any second while reading a book. Cooling (fan noise) is one thing, but often hard drive noise is very noticeable too. A lot of hard drives are specialised in being silent and there are some smart tricks and tools to damp noise even more but it will still have moving part and therefore produce noise.

An other alternative is to use a solid state disk (SSD) because it has no moving part thus makes no noise. The most common SSD is the SD Card and with prices of these cards dropping every month it's getting more and more attractive to use as a silent Operation System hard drive for you media center. You can get an 8 GB SanDisk SD Card for $18,- which should be enough to install Windows XP on and your media center software. But how can you replace your IDE or SATA hard drive with an SD Card? With an SD Card adapter. You replace the hard drive with the adapter and plug in your SD Card. From that moment on the computer will see the SD Card as a standard hard drive (for example C:).

Obviously you'll need more than 8 GB in your media center to store all you media files. But by using an SD Card to boot your Operating System you've already exterminated 90% of the noticeable noise when your media center isn't in use.