the best solution found here, was to buy an external 3.5" drive usb enclosure. You can get one of these for $15-$20.
then took a 2.5" notebook hdd and installed it in the enclosure. This greatly reduces the amount of heat and noise generated as it runs 24/7.
Did this with parts that were laying around. Whichever route you go, you will need to disable the hdd timeout setting. it will cause problems if you don't.
You can use a USB powered 2.5" external drive, but you will still need to provide additional power via a powered hub and y-cable. Didn't want to have that many extra wires, so went the route stated above.