Quiet Hard Drives?

mickger

I've had this Western Digital 160Gig drive a while now and ever since ive got it i can hear a high pitched whineing from it.Its very annoying sometimes.Basically i'm looking for a quiet drive with no high pitched sound. Can you guys recommend a quiet drive. What are the best and where can i get them on the net? Tia

joePC

Seagate Barracuda drives are very quite you can get them here

JoePC

jessy

Not to sure what’s wrong there, I have a lot of WD disks and think there great, much quieter than Maxtor, Hitachi, might be a faulty disk.

mickger

jessy wrote:

Not to sure what’s wrong there, I have a lot of WD disks and think there great, much quieter than Maxtor, Hitachi, might be a faulty disk.

I had another WD drive and it was the same.Maybe i'm just unlucky

WizZard

Seagate drives are the quietest IMO

Capt'n Midnight

has anyone tried "antinoise" you put a mic near the noise and then speakers play it back in antiphase to cancel it out.

http://crs.chungbuk.ac.kr/~sjlee/noise.htm

RicardoSmith

Some people can hear this high pitched whine, others can't. If you do notice it it will drive you crazy. I've only ever noticed with the WD SE drives. Look for drives with Fluid-Dynamic Bearings. The Samsungs, and Seagates are well know for being quiet. Read some reviews and tech articles at www.silentpcreview.com about quietening HD's.

gline

yep i notice that high pitched whine out of 1 of my drives too, i think it is a maxtor drive though that i hear it off, an old 40gig ide one, its REALLY annoying

The Real B-man

yeah noticed that with a few hardrives like anything you get a goodins & baddins

RicardoSmith

The Real B-man wrote:

yeah noticed that with a few hardrives like anything you get a goodins & baddins

Some models are specifically made to be quieter. Its not luck.

Inspector Gadget

Seagates are exceptionally quiet - some have argued at the expense of speed, but what I'm reading suggests that the new 7200.8 is bloody fast as well as quiet. I think the Barracuda IV was probably the quietest drive ever made (even more so than the 7200.7 that replaced it). Samsung Spinpoints are a very close second IMHO.

The WD's I deal with (mostly FDB models) are noisy for my tastes - IBM/Hitachi's Deskstars make some noise, but it's not too bad. As for Maxtors, even the DiamondMax 10 I have here is a rattlebag IMHO. Not as bad as the late-model Quantum (who Maxtor later bought out, FWIW) Fireballs in the days of yore (possibly the noisiest drives ever), but enough to be annoying, at least for me...

Gadget

unkel

RicardoSmith wrote:

Some people can hear this high pitched whine, others can't. If you do notice it it will drive you crazy. I've only ever noticed with the WD SE drives. Look for drives with Fluid-Dynamic Bearings. The Samsungs, and Seagates are well know for being quiet. Read some reviews and tech articles at www.silentpcreview.com about quietening HD's.

Exactly. I've had a rake of WD-SE HD's and performance is great, but the noise is not. If you have an active NB cooler and / or a not so quiet cpu / graphics card, you probably don't notice it. I switched to Samsungs last year and at the time the Seagate Barracudas were slightly quieter than the Samsungs, but Samsung had much better performance

Always a trade-off methinks

gline

unkel wrote:

Exactly. I've had a rake of WD-SE HD's and performance is great, but the noise is not. If you have an active NB cooler and / or a not so quiet cpu / graphics card, you probably don't notice it. I switched to Samsungs last year and at the time the Seagate Barracudas were slightly quieter than the Samsungs, but Samsung had much better performance

Always a trade-off methinks

yeh i have to say i installed a few samsung drives in a mates pc and they do seem to be pretty quiet, i like them

sionnach

samsung are just releasing their new spinpoint quiet drives which go up to 250gb as opposed to the 160gb max previously available. From what i've heard so far they're using nitec motors, which are as silent as you can get.

I'm gonna be building a silent rig as soon as my tax return comes, gonna have 2 sata 250gb spinpoints in it.

BloodBath

I have 2 samsung spinpoints and I can't hear them at all.

Basically if you want top performance go WD or Hitachi. If you want quietness go with Seagate or Samsung although the samsung performance is better than the seagates.


BloodBath

RicardoSmith

I doubt that the performance difference is hardly noticable in real world conditions. Personally I fancy a 400GB Seagate 7200.8 drive

gline

RicardoSmith wrote:

I doubt that the performance difference is hardly noticable in real world conditions.

I totally agree, the difference isnt that dramtic and most people are only using it for games\music\applications etc, not anything that needs massive preformance

davidclayton

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

has anyone tried "antinoise" you put a mic near the noise and then speakers play it back in antiphase to cancel it out.

http://crs.chungbuk.ac.kr/~sjlee/noise.htm

can you get software for this?