I recently stuck a hard drive in my PS2 as I managed to find someone locally selling a network adapter. I installed a few of my games onto it using HDLoader, and I noticed that when the hard drive is in use (so when playing a game or running HDLoader) it is pretty goddamn loud. It seems to be spinning at it's max speed all the time and it reverberates around the whole bloody house. Is this normal when using a hard drive with the PS2, or do I have a crappy drive? I could try putting a different one in but IDE drives are a PITA to find where I live and I'd rather know if it's worth testing other ones. I am not using one of the official Sony drives, just a regular 3.5" 120GB IDE drive I took out of an old PC. Cheers
That's not normal. The PS2's fan runs faster (ie louder) with a HDD installed than without, but the drive itself should sound just like any other drive. If you're sure it's the HDD and not the fan, try another one.
OK, thanks for the input - perhaps I'll try it again with the top of the console off and I can check it's definitely not the fan that's making the noise.
is it one of those slim line MaxTor disks or a desk star.. something like that, sounds (no pun intended) like the disk is just old
It's just an old Seagate drive IIRC, but yeah it probably is just old and tired. I'll check the fan as I said before, but I'll probably just swap the drive out and see if it helps.
I found this to be annoying too, with the prices of SSD going down I'm tempted to buy even a 120GB HDD and an IDE to SATA adapter to see if it works. Has anyone done this already?
Yup, works fine. On the Xbox as well. They might die a bit sooner than when used in a PC since neither console issues any TRIM commands (really mostly an issue on the Xbox, not so much the PS2), but as you said, prices go down all the time so... whatever. You might have to install the drive at odd angles though, depending on where your adapter has its ports.
But are you really, really sure that it is your HDD unit? The fan in the SCPH-39000 series is the loudest, especially once the expansion bay is activated (regardless of whether the HDD is in use or not). The sound of my Seagate ST3802110A spinning up is audible, but the sound of the fan eventually drowns out the sounds made by the HDD after that. If you're really bothered by the sounds made by the fan, then the SCPH-50000 series is more suited for you. They deliberately redesigned the console to be quieter.
I have been meaning to check for sure, I will do it tonight. If it's the fan that's the problem then is it possible to swap the case fan out for a better one?
People have done that, but I don't know whether it was meant to have a different fan in there. If it's quieter, it might not give the same airflow. But that is your decision.
I imagine that, as long as the case fan is a standard size, putting an aftermarket one in there would be a strict upgrade - it will almost certainly be quieter and move more air, somehow I doubt the PS2 has a particularly good fan inside. It's the same deal with the Xbox. But then again, I could be wrong.
Realised I never followed up on this - it was the fan that was loud. I found a 5000x model locally and that is MUCH quieter, only problem is that now I am having trouble with the DVD drive in that one....
Why care about the DVD drive with that setup? Just cut out the middle man and copy games directly from a PC to the HDD.
Yeah, I know it's not a big problem. Just that I would like my hardware to be fully functional, a faulty drive might be a sign that the thing wasn't so well looked after, I also like to watch the occasional DVD on it.
