hdd recommendations

[Rambler]

Hi guys, i desperately need new hdd and i could use some advice.

Basically, i'm aiming at 200-250GB drives, preferably from Seagate or Maxtor. So there come few candidates like Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3250823AS - 250GB SATA NCQ, Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L250S0 - 250GB 16MB SATA or their counterparts from the 200GB camp.

My (almost) only concern is about the noise of these disks. I have (beside others) Seagate Barracuda IV, so you can understand i like quiet drives. From what i've read the 7200.8 and diamondmax 10 come almost equal in terms of performance and noise (apart being louder than their PATA counterparts), but i'm wondering how much louder they are than Barr.IV. 7200.8 supposedly has very loud seek.

So what would you recommend? Which one of these? Or completely other hdd?

 

[Ty]

I recommend www.storagereview.com

 

[poopypoo]

HDD recommendations are bound to be subjective, I believe, since benchmarks generally bear out similar numbers and failure rate reports generally contradict each other. That said, I offer my subjective opinion. Quietude has never been priority #1 for me, so... take it with a grain. I'm sold on Seagate though. My impression from using them for about a decade now is that they fail slightly less frequently than others' drives. If I had to go with a lesser manufacturer, I'd probably go WD, since they seem to be performance innovators and are usually cheap, on sale. I think the quietest drive I have bought recently, though, was a Samsung spinpoint. I can't recommend them exactly yet, though, as I have no idea how long it will last, and I bought it because it was really, really cheap at the time. ^^;

 

[bystander]

How about a Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JD?

SilentPCReview shows it to be as quiet as the Seagate Barracuda IV(when you switch AAM on).

If you're really interested in the 7200.8 have a look in SPCR's forums, they're usually a good source of info for finding out if a part is quiet or not.

 

[Rambler]

Well yeah, i was looking for subjective oppinions, because obviously i can read some reviews on the web, but i'm looking for more of a real life experience with these drives.

As for WD - well i had a WD drive long time ago, but have no experience with the newer drives and for samsung i'm bit skeptical for they are not on the market for long time yet.

I'll check the SPCR's forum though, thanks for the tip.

 

[Guden Oden]

All harddrives bought today are very quiet, basically it's moot wether one is picked over another if noise is the only concern.

Much more important than that is performance. Drives with very quiet seeks have RUBBISH performance. Seagate is one of the worst offenders, their drives have been slow as fuck for ages now. I myself wouldn't get a seagate for all the whiskey in ireland.

Hitachi all the way baybeh! They typically beat pretty much the entire competition each generation, heck, their 400GB drive from LAST gen still places very good with drives that are over a year more recent and beats many of them. Hitachi's also the only one who uses headramps to on their 3.5" drives to park the heads off the disks themselves rather than the stoneage contact start/stop method of headparking, and their bigger drives even have acceleration sensors to counter vibrations and stuff.

 

[Frank]

Hitachi seems to have become the general hardware manufacturer with the overall best price/performance at the moment.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I quite like Segates. The run very cool and quiet (of course this may not matter if your PC already runs like a jet engine). They don't usually benchmark at the top speed, but a couple of milliseconds down from the top is a price I happily pay for the fact that they are much, much quieter than anything else out there. Most drives are pretty fast nowadays, especially when running at 7200rpm and with large caches, so speeds are often limited by the interface and burst speeds are not always indicative of sustained speeds.

 

[ferro]

Samsung Spinpoint drives are very cool & quiet. More so than Seagate 7200.7 or 7200.8 drives in my experience.

 

[PC-Engine]

Which ones have the best warranties?

 

[Druga Runda]

well I have a 300GB Maxtor and well it's fast and has loud seeks, at least louder than 160GB WD which I also have...

 

[RussSchultz]

The 160GB Seagate I got from Circuit CIty for $35 after rebates is very quiet, compared to drives from two years ago.

But that's not saying much.

 

[nutball]

As for WD - well i had a WD drive long time ago, but have no experience with the newer drives and for samsung i'm bit skeptical for they are not on the market for long time yet.

I have a Samsung 160GB, it's significantly quieter than the Barracuda IV it replaced. By all accounts the more recent Samsung drives aren't so quiet though, as they changed suppliers for the motors (even for newly built drives in old model ranges).

The real trick to hard-drive silencing is suspending the drive so that the vibrations aren't transmitted through the case.

I'll check the SPCR's forum though, thanks for the tip.

Beware, SPCR can lead to addiction to silent computing! (It did for me!).

 

[PC-Engine]

The real trick to hard-drive silencing is suspending the drive so that the vibrations aren't transmitted through the case.

Well there are two kinds of HDD noise, the whine of the platter and the seeks. Suspension can dampen the seeks but doesn't really help the whine. Personally I find the whine much more annoying as it's on all the time where as the seeks only happen occassionally and in short burst. The only exceptions is if you're defraging, virus scanning or the like.

 

[nutball]

Well there are two kinds of HDD noise, the whine of the platter and the seeks. Suspension can dampen the seeks but doesn't really help the whine. Personally I find the whine much more annoying as it's on all the time where as the seeks only happen occassionally and in short burst. The only exceptions is if you're defraging, virus scanning or the like.

As far as I'm concerned, if you can hear it, it's annoying. Seeks (if I could hear them) would be more annoying *because* they're intermittent.

If you have more than one drive, the beating of the motor vibrations between the two is worse, but for a single quiet drive the seeks are the killer IMO.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I have two IBM HDDs (180GXP 120GB and 120GXP 60GB), I activated AAM -> no more seek noises.
I have some bad vibrations, but my case is a crappy noname one with a lousy HDD cage.

My next HDD will probably be a Hitachi T7K250, 250GB (dunno if I'll take an IDE or SATA version; probably IDE as it's a bit cheaper, it's not like there's a real difference)

 

[Rambler]

Thanks for all the suggestions and opinions.
I'm now more willing to give Samsung a try, so i included it into the selection.

Well there are two kinds of HDD noise, the whine of the platter and the seeks. Suspension can dampen the seeks but doesn't really help the whine. Personally I find the whine much more annoying as it's on all the time where as the seeks only happen occassionally and in short burst. The only exceptions is if you're defraging, virus scanning or the like.

Yeah, same here - i'm much more sensitive to high frequencies - as the whine. Seek can be louder, but it's more bearable since you don't hear it all the time.

I will do some more reading though.

Beware, SPCR can lead to addiction to silent computing! (It did for me!).

Nah, this won't happen, because despite i might like to get addicted to it, i simply don't have the money for all these additional things - heck i even upgrade my pc once in like 4 years

 

[_xxx_]

ANYTHING but Maxtor. Three Maxtor drives died on me in the last couple of years, all the others I had still work just fine. Never again Maxtor for me.

 

[Saem]

Most drive manufacturers have been cutting back on the length of warrenty on their products -- shows you how much they believe in their products. I think the only one that hasn't been doing this is WD, I've never had an issue with a WD drive and I know many others that recommend them.

BTW, didn't hitachi buy out IBM's HDD divisions, the same guys who made the "death stars", drives that would die easily within a year.

 

[PC-Engine]

Most drive manufacturers have been cutting back on the length of warrenty on their products -- shows you how much they believe in their products. I think the only one that hasn't been doing this is WD, I've never had an issue with a WD drive and I know many others that recommend them.

BTW, didn't hitachi buy out IBM's HDD divisions, the same guys who made the "death stars", drives that would die easily within a year.

Yeah but Hitachi was already in the HDD business before that. They just wanted to grow and also aquire the Microdrive patents. I think they've turned IBM's poor reliability record around.