Quietest mechanical HDD

Assuming you're talking about 3.5" drives, I don't think that the WD Greens can be beaten for low noise, and they're low power too.

I've had quite a few of them, and had good experiences. With a few of them (1TB and 2TB models) I could sit the bare drive on a desk and would struggle to tell if it was powered on, even when seeking.

 

Isn't a single HDD external with your music collection and backups a bit volatile? Shouldn't you at least go for an external RAID 1?

I have 6 WD Greens and they're great for noise (or lack thereof)

 

The noise is aggressive head seeks, meaning fast is noisier. Most drives can be quieted a lot if you enable AAM, at a cost to seek performance. The drive needs to be directly connected by SATA to configure this.

Greens are indeed quiet . Their read write throughput will be a bit of a bottleneck for USB3 though.

On the other hand you need to be careful with some 7200 RPM drives in enclosures without fan cooling.

 

I've found that most modern 5900 RPM and lower drives are now equally quiet.

I've got WD, Samsung, Hitachi, and Seagate drives and the only time they are audible is when they aren't in a case and I'm using a bare drive in one of the SATA -> USB cradles. The only drives I haven't tried are Toshiba drives. But I believe Toshiba drives are just rebadged Hitachi drives.

Either way, I believe there's only 2 HDD manufacturer's now anyway. Seagate and WD. Everything else is either owned by them or uses one of their rebadged drives.

Hitachi's drive unit is now owned by WD, I believe, while Intel owns the Samsung HDD unit.

Regards,
SB

 

Probably worth having a look on www.silentpcreview.com to see what they say.

Their acoustic testing is pretty much the most comprehensive around.

I seem to recall that the earlier WD Green Power drives had problems with the heads parking too often but I presume this issue is now resolved (if it ever was a problem).

In fact, I've actually got one of these sitting on my desk at present ready to add in to a server/NAS for home if I can ever find the beans to make one! It's a 500GB first gen Greenpower drive and I remember it was pretty much inaudible when in operation in my old HTPC.

 

IME, rubber grommet mounts is pretty much the best thing you can do wrt HDD noise, it cuts down on both spindle noise to some extent, but more importantly; head seeks, and this by rather substantial amounts.

So not having a hard, rigid connection between the HDD frame and the computer chassis does far more than stepping down from a 7200RPM drive (of today) to something slow and pedestrian. Of course, if performance is entirely a non-factor, one could do both - but the grommets should always be there, if noise is in fact the most important thing.

 

Suspension with elastic cord works pretty effectively to remove every hint of vibration/resonance. Also, 2.5" drives tend to be quieter than 3.5" drives. Much more expensive for the capacity, of course.

 

Much slower as well. Anyway, while rubber bands are a solution, they're typically made with latex, which ages quickly. I wouldn't want my HDD to drop to the bottom of my chassi's drive cage due to its suspension drying out and cracking, potentially while it's still spinning. That'd almost certainly be absolutely disastrous.

 

When I used suspension in my old HTPC I used a sort of elastic cord used to create jewellery with beads. That PC was operational for 3 years and the cord didn't show any sign of cracking/degrading. The biggest problem with the stuff was managing to tie a knot in it to keep the drive suspended!

I know that others use elastic cord clad in fabric to ensure there is no chance of the drives dropping.

The 2.5" drives actually tend to be faster than their 3.5" equivalents due to the sheer density of data on the disks. Obviously, this assumes that both are spinning at the same speed. If Rys wants absolutely the quietest drive around he'll be looking for one spinning at 5400rpm.

That said, I've not really looked into silencing PCs for a few years but a quick look on SPCR would tend to indicate that the WD Green disks are probably the better option.

 

That'd be a very sensible precaution, one I would approve of myself. Fortunately, my Antec chassis has rather thick grommets pre-installed as standard so I don't need to faff with elastic cords, cloth-clad or not... I love those grommets, they really made a huge difference on my 3.5" drive. I was surprised how muffled seeks were, actually. My WD velociraptors weren't as affected, likely due to the smaller and lighter actuators I would imagine.

Do you have any sources backing that claim up? Because logic says this is not true. A 3.5" drive has much larger discs with longer outer tracks that hold much much more data. You can read more data before the drive needs to seek, and seeks are really really slow in a harddrive. Just switching to the neighbor track is typically 1-2 milliseconds, plus average rotational latency before you can read the sector you need.

Also, laptop drives should not have higher areal density compared to a desktop drive of the same generation, that does not make sense.

2.5" laptop drives, especially 5400RPM drives, have historically had much slower actuators compared to desktop drives (maybe a power consideration as much as a size/weight one...) Plus 5400RPM spindle speed means longer rotational latency ofcoz.

Yeah, a 2.5" 5400RPM drive spindle is bound to be almost dead quiet. You could maybe hear it seeking over case fans if it is screwed in tight to the chassis without suspension, but I doubt it and it wouldn't be bothersome in the least anyhow.

 

As far as I am familiar with, there are either 5400 or 7200 rpm, or 10k but that is an extreme and very expensive case which is not worth mentioning...

Regarding 2.5 and 3.5" drives- I would tend to agree that the user experience with an 7200 rpm 2.5" is much more pleasant than with a corresponding 3.5" drive. The sound, the performance, etc...

 

whichever drive you end up buying, put it into a NoVibes suspension. I have used two of them for many years (8-10) and no signs of the elastic band wearing out. Makes a huge difference in noise level.

 

Samsung and Western Digital both used 5900 RPM for their "green" drives. I believe Seagate also had 5900 RPM "green" drives at least for their first gen of that drive line.

All of my WD green drives are 5900 RPM for example. But I haven't purchased one of their green drives in a year or two now. So they might have changed with their new lines.

Regards,
SB

 

When I say 2.5" drives are faster than 3.5" drives, I'm talking about when the platter capacity is the same between the two. Several years ago, at least (when I last paid much attention to the speed and relative silence of disks!), I seem to recall that the highest density platters were initially introduced in the 2.5" disks and they had duly had higher data transfer rates.

Obviously, SSDs and their reducing costs have changed the situation somewhat as regards quiet disks. Disk acoustics were previously an important aspect of keeping a PC silent but, with SSDs and cheap NAS that is no longer so relevant.

 

I can't recall that ever being the case. And even if it were, it'd have to have significantly higher area density in order to have higher sequential transfer speeds once you go to the outer tracks on a 3.5" drive.

Where 2.5" drives have an advantage is in random seek times which is why that form factor is particularly attractive in servers and workstations. This in turn could potentially leader to higher I/O since data when accessed usually isn't in large contiguous blocks (well other than video files).

Regards,
SB

 

I just purchased WD's newest EZRX Green 3.5" it's 7200 same as previous gen EARX model.

 

Bad news from xbitlabs and anandtech

Seagate to Cease Production of 7200rpm Mobile Hard Drives This Year
Seagate to Focus on Solid-State Hybrid Drives for Performance-Demanding Mobile Apps

Seagate to Discontinue 7200rpm 2.5" Drives Later This Year

 

Rys do you have esata, much quicker than usb

oops

 

Ummm, no. Looking it up it appears they are all now 5400 RPM and no longer 5900 RPM. Green drives have never been 7200 RPM.

I'm guessing this was done to reduce the cost of manufacturing and increased areal density means the boost in performance from going to 5900 RPM wasn't worth it anymore.

[edit] actually looking more, they might still be doing 5900 RPM as WD still isn't officially saying how fast they are, just that they are using Intellipower. Most sites just guess 5400 RPM. One site when the Green drives were first released actually tested it and came to the conclusion that it was doing 5900 RPM just like Seagate with their LP series.

Regards,
SB