External firewire hard drive to go with Mac Mini.

The WD 2TB drives (green, not black) should be a good choice. They spin at 5400 rpm (vs 7200 rpm for most full size SATA drives) and by default have decent acoustic management. The black ones should be ok too but you don't need the extra speed and power consumption for audio files.

There are 1.5 TB Seagate desktop drives that have firmware issues. The problem is that after x number of power cycles they turn in to a "brick". "x" is not really known. If you have a Seagate 1.5 TB drive make sure you check their website for FW upgrade based on your drive's S/N.

All SATA drives should have acoustic management settings. If you're savvy enough figure out how to set the acoustic management setting you may be able to reduce some noise. A lot depends on the drive itself. I never checked but I would hope that most external drive packages via USB or Firewire have the acoustic management settings set to quietest since by design they're not meant for performance (because of the USB or Firewire interface).

Thanks Larry, are you talking about the WD 2TB My Book Studio Addition II with RAID?

I went with the WD green drives (5400rpm) but bought individual enterprise level drives. I feel that these are better than the consumer level drive. They are very quiet. I put them in an Icy Dock enclosure with a variable speed fan,.

Dracule1,
I don't know what drives WD puts in their "black boxes". I only have access to "raw" drives from manufacturers. In general, especially light home use, any of their drives should be fine. Same for most manufacturers.

Rbstehno, thanks suggesting the Seagate. I was interested in the Free Agent 2 TB HD, but there seems to be a problem with Free Agent drives and Macs. Specifically, there is an Amazon review by a guy who bought this drive for his Mac. Here is A. Leong's review on May 31, 2010:

"Do not buy this drive if you use sleep/ hibernate on your mac. I bought two of these to house my media library and to serve as a backup drive for my Mac Mini in my living room. First the positives: this drive is fast. I didn't have any problems with delay when I accessed data on the drive (iTunes library, movies, pictures). It's also quiet. It's fanless so no distraction when listening to music. The light on the bottom is anoying, but tollerable. Now for the big problem: if the drive goes into hibernate, it will not wake up, freezing you computer and forcing a hard reboot. With the updated firmware from Seagate, it takes about 15 min on inactivity. I used an applet to constantly ping it so that it wouldn't sleep. That was fine except if your mac goes to sleep, it will also hiberate this drive. Somehow, the time machine drive would still sleep everyday and freeze the mini, as a result. So, in short, if you're the kind of user who boots up your computer, does what you need to do, and then shuts it down, these are the drives for you. If you leave your computer on for any period of time, don't buy these."

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-FireWire-External-ST320005FJA105-RK/product-reviews/B002DW94WS/ref=cm_cr_pr_recent?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

Have you had any problem like this?