A quiet external HD for Macpro

Apologies pulled my message by mistake as I wanted to edit it. I currently have an external G-drive which I use to access my images and work on them. I find the noise it makes becoming rather irritating and was contemplating a new external drive preferably without a fan. What options do I have? I could go for another large footprint drive but would prefer to go for something smaller like WD ultra? Question is whether it would be good to go fanless as the drive will be on every day when I am working on my images. What is the consensus? And what alternatives do I have? SSD is the way but expensive.
Thanks for any input
Rene de Heet

Please read the many threads on external drives. In general the external drives sold by the manufacturers are unreliable and don't last a long time since the enclosures simply are not properly ventilated and the drives run hot. The best option is to buy a fanned enclosure or at least one that is designed with a high level of passive cooling and then purchase a seperate desktop drive and put it in the enclosure.

Among 3TB drives, the quietest are the WD Green drive but they are also the slowest because they only spin at 5400 RPM and they also start and stop a lot to save power which slows them down and potentially adds another thing that can fail on the drives. But if low noise is what you want, get a WD Green 3TB drive and put it in an enclosure with a very high level of passive cooling like this one:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3QHKIT0GB/

For maximum performance and reliability I would get a HGST 3TB drive or one of the Enterprise drives from any manufacturer and a fanned enclosure but that won't meet your quiet requirement.

I followed Tony and E.J.'s advice and combined it with my own experiences.  There's a lot of junk out there that vendors are glad to sell you.

From my own experiences:
1.  I will never buy anything from Seagate again.  I will never buy any hard drive from Staples again or any enclosed hard drive again (just as E.J. advised above).   If you do read this, you have been warned.  Chances are, if a person persists with one of the above.....sooner or later, they will get burned by one of the above.  That is my opinion based on much of my own experiences dealing with this.

Now, based on Tony Medici's and E.J.'s advice:
2.  I looked into Other World Computing (OWC) after reading Tony and E.J. on this.  I now intend to use OWC exclusively whenever I need hard drives, docks or fanned enclosures.  OWC is top shelf....much, much better than dealing with Staples and the like.  But I think they deal only in Mac.  Oh....just noticed that that is what you have...a MBP, just like me.   

  From OWC, I bought 3 Toshiba 3TB Enterprise-grade hard drives and I plopped two of them into a NOISELESS Rocketstor (brand) dock (with Thunderbolt; i.e. it moves data VERY rapidly), also bought from OWC.   Ok, they do get fairly hot.  But according to the OWC folks, they are built to take these temps.  I CAN place my hand on them after they have been running awhile and I do not get burned.    But they are warmer than warm for sure.  Because these are Enterprise-grade hard drives, I expect them to go for about 2 to 3 years.   They have 5 year warranties.  I am not going to count on them lasting that long.    I have backed up these drives using a trial version of Carbon Copy Cloner right now.  And I like that too and will buy it.   

Also, I think I am going to take Mark Picard's advice and rotate these hard drives......where one is always stored off the premises in a bank vault (that's right , off the premises, and each has the same copy of data on it.  Oh, and I also unplug the Thunderbolt cord after the cloning, so that electrical storms cannot be a negative factor. 

Yes, the HGST is supposed to be the best, but for some reason (and I do not recall, but it was not to save money....DO NOT SKIMP ON QUALITY WHEN IT COMES TO THIS)  I opted for the Toshiba's which where right beside the HGST in the OWC listings.  I felt that the best for me was to buy high-quality (Enterprise-grade!), external drives with NO enclosures wrapped around them when they were manufactured.  

If you want quiet hard drives, you are not going to hear a thing with these except a very mild "spooling up" sound at the beginning only.  After that an occasional  very mild clicking.  Honestly, I do not even notice them running once they spool up.  

After writing all that....I have only had this Enterprise-dirve array for a month or so.  

That is all I know at this time.  Sure hope it helped you some.  :)

OWC sells many things for the PC platform and things like hard drives and HD enclosures are not platform specific.