Okay, then. Amazon is selling the WD "Caviar Black" 1TB disks for $105.98. I've ordered two of those. I don't actually care about speed so much as noise and power consumption (and not gratuitously blowing up, of course). From a pretty detailed review, here are some noise numbers:



The Caviar Black that I'm getting is 3.6dB louder than the Caviar Green. That's non-trivial, but tolerable (we'll have to see how good a job the case does of muffling it). But then there's power consumption:



Since most of the time the computer isn't actually doing much with the disks, but it's otherwise on, the idle power numbers are the ones that really matter to me. The power differences are quite surprising: an extra 2.7 watts for what's presumably very similar hardware. None of this is in "break the bank" territory. It's just unfortunate that I have to take a noise and power penalty just to have a drive that might actually last a few years without going belly-up on me.