DVD drive noise - recommendations?

[Lexje]

When using common PC as media director or core, the internal DVD drives often are quite noisy compared to a stand alone DVD player.
Are there any recommendations to keep the DVD spinning noise under control? Can it slow down spinning speed and still play allright?

Thanks,

Erwin

[nite_man]

You can use hdparm: http://tinyurl.com/lbzlu:

Code:

hdparm -E 12 /dev/dvdrom

That command will set the speed of DVD driver to 12x. Note, that ndparm works with IDE drives only.

[royw]

DVD drives are pretty inexpensive so you might want to just replace it.  Finding a quiet drive can be a challenge (very few noise benchmarks).  Luckily most are pretty quiet at 1X DVD speed, but then really boost the dB for high speed ripping.

Interestingly my old (2+yr) Memorex dvd writer while slower can rip some disks that my newer, higher speed drives (DVD BURN PIONEER DVR-115DBK, PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-111C) can not.  All three are quiet at 1X. 

The one bad drive I've had is the Sony AD-7170S, it was too noisy at 1X playback (audible at 4m during quiet parts of movies).

HTH,
Roy