[mythtvnz] Quiet DVD drives?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:39:23 +1300, you wrote:

>On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Stephen Worthington
><stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
>> I am looking at what I would need for a MythTV box for my mother.  She
>> is a complete technophobe and can be guaranteed to find a way of
>> making any piece of technology do something strange.  She does have
>> some DVDs that she watches, including opera, so any box for her would
>> need a DVD drive.  But all the modern ones seem to be very high speed
>> and *extremely* loud, so that they grossly interfere with hearing a
>> program if they are in the same room.  The obvious solution to that is
>> what I do - rip the DVD and play it from hard disk.  But my mother is
>> very unlikely to be able to do that.  So, I was wondering if anyone
>> out there had run across a quiet DVD drive recently?
>
>I have seen info on the -users mailing list about how to limit the
>speed of the drive, which quietens it considerably.

Thanks for that.  It looks like hdparm -E is what I want.  I will have
a play with that and see how effective it is.  But only once I recover
the MythTV box - the boot partition on disk 4 that I am using for
trying out 9.10-0.22-fixes-JYA has just crashed again for the second
time in two days.  fsck is reporting all sorts of nasties, so I do not
think I will be able to recover it.  And I am getting a persistent
error when booted from 9.04 saying it is unable to enumerate a USB
port.  I must have a hardware problem somewhere.