Any chance that this would work inside the casing of the HSX-109?

If not the consumer models, what about the plexiglass prototype I'm using?

How warm does the drive get in the HSX-109?

Some of the prototypes and all of the production units have sound reducing mounts. I believe the production units also have drives which are spun up in "quiet mode" (or did I dream that??).

Rob

You probably were not dreaming.

Many IDE drives have the "acoustic" feature set, permitting trade offs to be made between access time and noise, with head dampening algorithms. (Rob already knows that; this is for the benefit of others)

-ml

Now is that feature a set and forget type thing in the firmware, or does the driver have to set this every boot? I'm curious, because I have a media system in the front room, and being able to set this would be awesome. If it's a driver setting, I'm probably SOL since it's Windows 2000.

It is set with software provided by the manufacturer (usually runs in DOS or off a boot disk). Click below for links to Maxtor and IBM utilities.
Maxtor AMSET
IBM Feature Tool

I guess it's time for hard drive upgrades in my house, the media center is towards the bottom of the parts chain, and only has a 4gb Ultra 33 drive in it currently.

Thanks for the links though, they will be put to good use in the future.