I am interested in purchasing the LaCie 1big Dock (10TB). I read a review that mentioned that there are no rubber isolator or bumpers between the drive, caddy, and case to minimize the drive noise. Does anyone own the LaCie 1big Dock and do you notice a significant amount of noise being generated during read/writes?
iMac 27″, macOS 10.13
It’s not so much about the drive siting on a flat surface. It is about the vibrations that occur inside the enclosure itself. Usually there is some kind of rubber bumpers to help “soften” the vibrations the hard drive mechanism generates when there are intense R/W going on (e.g. image or video editing). A SSD would great but it’s too expensive.
Any drive that sits on a hard surfaces table or desk will reverberate a bit. I use a mouse pad under my rotational drives and it isolates them from the table top very nicely. Then all I hear are the head solenoids/relays when the heard are reading and writing.
If you're using the drive as a Time Machine drive a rotation model is a reasonable choice. If it's for storage and using files with apps an SSD drive would be a better choice: much faster and very, very quiet. I recommend these from OWC (MacSales.com):
Noise Level with LaCie 1big Dock
