On Tue, 24 Jan 2006, Francois Barre wrote:

Is it possible to make the drives turn slower ? To make the heads move slower ?
That would be my dream. No more heat, a 10mA consumption, no more noise...

Some drives do support quiet vs. performance modes.

hdparm will set this for you, however, from the hdparm manual page:

       -M     Get/set Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) setting. Most modern
              harddisk drives have the ability to speed down  the  head  move-
              ments  to  reduce  their  noise output.  The possible values are
              between 0 and 254. 128 is the most quiet (and therefore slowest)
              setting and 254 the fastest (and loudest). Some drives have only
              two levels (quiet / fast), while others may have different  lev-
              els  between  128 and 254.  THIS FEATURE IS EXPERIMENTAL AND NOT
              WELL TESTED. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Good luck!

Gordon