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Hard Drives Evaluated for Noise, Heat and Performance
Sander Sassen writes "Ever wondered what harddisks offer the best combination of performance and low noise? Hardware Analysis evaluates all recent 5400 and 7200-rpm harddisks and focuses on noise, heat production and overall performance. Their results show that 7200-rpm spindle speed is no guarantee for high-performance and that low-noise and high-performance is not an impossible combination with some harddisks."
It's about damned time. We have more than enough reviews on speed and performance, but there is a serious dearth of information on noise.
/.'d in 30 seconds... great performance!
Fastest. Slashdotting. Ever.
Seagate's Barracuda IV drives are great! Exceptionally quiet (the CPU cooling fan generates more noise) and I've not run across a single failure in ~100 sold.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
If you're looking for a good 7200-rpm harddisk then look no further than the Western Digital WD800BB, with 2MB cache, just a tad bit slower than the WD800JB which features 8MB of cache. The surprising newcomer is the Samsung SP8004H that scores well on all fronts and certainly deserves your attention too.
Equally surprising was the performance of Western Digital's 400AB and 800AB, both 5400-rpm harddisks showed exceptional performance on par with all but the fastest 7200-rpm harddisks. If you're looking for an affordable, high-performance and yet silent 5400-rpm harddisk either of these will fit your needs exactly.
If you're however looking for a harddisk that offers an impressive combination of performance and low noise then look no further than Seagate's ST380021A Barracuda IV, it really is an engineering marvel that combines the best of both worlds. No match for the IBM or Western Digital but a fair trade-off between performance and noise level.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
If you follow discussions at other forums for ReplayTV and TiVo owners, you already know that in that situation you don't really care about performance. A 5400rpm drive can easily handle the job. However, noise is critical, and hence, some of these systems don't have fans, making heat also critical--if you upgrade with a drive that runs hotter than the original, you're likely to have random failures.
So this sort of review is wonderful, both for the information it provides, and for encouraging manufacturers to pay attention to these factors so that they will look good in the future.
The heat and noise info would be especially useful when configuring a small form factor PC like the Shuttle SS51g that /. has been mentioning alot lately.
"...more and more of our imports come from overseas." - G.W. Bush
Good thing they did that report so they know what to replace their current drives with when we get done burning all their motors up.
I'll bet that server is making some noise right now. WHHHHHHHRRRRRRR!!! *snap, crackle, pop*
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
This is a timely article, what with hard drive warranties having just been bumped from three years to one in a few of the leading brands (including Maxtor). Word is the WD w/ 8 meg cache still has 3 years.
I think their webserver's hard drive just went up in flames.
I am Linux sysadmin and run a beowulf cluster of computers with 7200 rpm IBM harddrives. These harddrives tend to create a lot of noise in the server room and so my remedy was to use a microphone and speaker-based linux solution to cancel the sound with a inverse of the loud hum. This system works efficiently and I have released my program controlling the speaker via the microphone under the GPL. .5 dB is now heard as opposed to 5 to 15 dB
- by the pope, popewax.com
Forgive me if I'm missing the point, but I can't see that choosing a hard disk on its noise production is in any way sensible. Surely the key factor is performance either in terms of speed, or if on a budget, whether one goes for a larger size which runs at a slower speed. Noise surely must be the most insignificant of all factors.
If you've ever played Dungeon Siege, you'll be familiar with the occasional sluggish framerate drop when you get near a new area, and the game starts dynamically loading the artwork and terrain resources for that area, giving the game its contiguous feel. Now I understand that SCSI hard drives have the ability to do non-blocking reads and writes, meaning that the CPU is able to keep processing while waiting for data from the hard drive. If what I think is true, then if I had a SCSI drive and played Dungeon Siege, the sluggishness when it loads new data would not occur, since the game would keep playing while it took a few seconds to load the data in the background.
If this isn't true... then wouldn't it be cool if hard drives could do this? Having games get sluggish every time they have to load new artwork resources from disk is annoying as hell.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
After all, when I use my PC, I'm plugged into a pair of headphones. Any noise my box makes is easily filtered out if not drowned out entirely. I don't work inside a data center (unlike some of my fellows), so moderation of headphone volume is the only thing I need to consider when I protect my hearing. PC and Harddrive noise shouldn't matter...
That is, until I decided to put together a multimedia PC for use in my living room. A 52x CD spin-up is painfully loud during the quiet moments during a movie or my favorite anime. Don't even ask me about a hard-drive wake-up grind or cooling fans.
In the end, my option was to hide the PC behind a soft fabric cover rather than to try to diminish the noise from the box.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Are there test rigs for hard drives, etc that allow for basic functionality testing?
I recently heard the sad tale of someone whose box was blown by lightning :( and of course they wondered if the drive was okay.
on plugging the drive into another motherboard, murphy's law kicked in, and he was the proud owner of another dead motherboard.
So are there test rigs that will allow for testing of drives at a basic level so that motherboards are not used as fuses? Probable uses include IT shops and repair shops.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Regardless of the current statistics, I think that hard drives have come a long way as far as noise production. I remember on a lot of my old PC's the huge amount of noise some of the hard-drives (old WD's and Maxtor's) used to make. I never needed to check the little indicator light to tell when my hard drive was whizzing away, you could hear it from the next room.
I probably won't buy a hard-drive based on noise-factor (or possibly heat factor) alone if the price difference is significant. After the drives of 10 years back, most current models hum like music. When it's just humming away (no data-access clicking), the sound of a hard-drive can actually be somewhat relaxing.
On an contrary note: I once worked in a testing lab that had about 40+ machines. When they were all running, the room hummed, but the noise was somewhat subliminal. Walking out of the room into a busy office, you definately noticed an increase in noise. On days I worked overtime however, leaving the lab to dead silence was quite noticable... I almost missed the conforting hum sometimes.
Noise ratings on scanners/printers/CD-ROMS would be nice. These tend to be a lot more irritating than hard drives. Anyone know a site?
The top of the front page currently says:
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Google's cache from a month ago gives some perspective:
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Equally surprising was the performance of Western Digital's 400AB and 800AB, both 5400-rpm harddisks showed exceptional performance on par with all but the fastest 7200-rpm harddisks. If you're looking for an affordable, high-performance and yet silent 5400-rpm harddisk either of these will fit your needs exactly.
I have setup many systems (mainly Dells) that ship with Western Digital HDs. A large number of those drives failed very soon thereafter. When Dell came to replace the drives, they were replaced with Maxtors.
Also, here is a snippet from Gibson Research regarding their SpinRite product.
Note: We no longer purchase Western Digital drives, even though their retail point of sale packaging is pretty and the drives are inexpensive. We decided that reliability is more important than a pretty box and saving a few bucks, so we've switched over to Quantum drives exclusively, and have been having much better luck ... so far.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
I wonder what their server's harddisk temperature is right now... did they actually post this to slashdot on purpose?
id have to say that ever since i moved my main pc into the front room ive taken much more notice of noise..probably cause otherwise my wife would kick it out.The new generation of ide and scsi hard drives are sooo quiet its unbelievable.In fact when i power up my sparc classic with its old 1gb 50 pin scsi it makes my head hurt... Unbelievable the difference a few years has made.
Sadly, the site has been slashdotted into oblivion, so I need the help of those who have seen the site. I miss the cicada like whining of the drive from my old vaxstation, which drive would help bring back that sense of nostalgia? Also, extra heat output would be great since it is almost winter again here in the states.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Why not develop a speedy drive that can slow itself down if it starts to generate too much heat or if it's not being used (as opposed to shutting it completely off)? I assume it's probably much easier to create a single speed motor than a variable speed one, but what would the disadvantages be?
;)
Of course there may not be any true advantages to such a thing either, although I tend to think that if could run about 4 times faster than normal for 10 second while it loads a single big file it might be worth it. There's also a chance that these alredy exist and I'm just out of the loop
I would sooner transcribe all of my work to punch-cards than trust Western Digital with a single BIT of my data. I've owned several WD drives and they are ALL TRASH. They almost always fail (read: TOTAL HEAD CRASH) within 2 months of usage. We use WD drives at work and they are always failing, failing, failing. JUNK. Do NOT trust Western Digital. Do NOT get suckered in by their high storage capacity--you'll just lose all your data all the quicker.
IBM on the other hand, made (sadly, past tense now) some damn fine hard drives. I own several IBM SCSI drives and they work, period. They are on and spinning 24x7, and have been doing so for about 3 years without a hitch. There isn't a Western Digital drive in the universe that can come close to reliability like that.
Don't forget about the ones sparking it up in the woods!
Has anyone built a case that wasn't made out of thin sheets of metal? What if you made a case filled with sound insulation such as styrofoam or eggshell foam, leaving only the air intake/exhaust vents exposed?
Seems to me that so much money is being spent on making PC components quiet, presumably so we can nuzzle our faces next to the motherboard and take a nap, but why can't we just isolate the sound inside the box? It's my -novice- understanding of airflow design that little or no heat is dissipated by using a metal box; the heat is transfered through the moving air. Well, keep the air moving and soundproof the case.
Is this a stupid idea? Maybe it's like my idea to make a solar powered, weather balloon lifted, permanently high altitude platform for launching space missions - a fool proof and economical plan for capitalist conquest! I just need to develop an attention span and find some fundin-- HEY! Something shiny!
Keywords: Linux, sysadmin, beowulf cluster, white noise hack, GPLed code.
Sounds like the perfect troll.
Care to post a non Goatse link to this code? Or how about a pic of you in front of the mysterious cluster.
storagereview.com
Huge database of very indepth reviews on hard drives. Scsi, ide, 5400-15000rpm.. Basically everything, with noise, temperature, and a few different benchmarks for different usage conditions.
Definatly the best resource I've found for hard drive tests. I always consult this site before a hard drive purchase.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
One thing that could be improved on many of these quantitative reviews is if they quit relying upon surface temperature probes (which is HORRIBLY unreliable. A slightly grainy texture would make the drive appear much cooler because of reduced heat transfer), and instead go right to the source: Power consumption. Is it so hard to measure the current on the 5 and 12V inputs, and deriving an actual power consumption metric for the drive? Not only is this valuable as it absolutely directly relates to heat, but it additionally is useful for those building low power rigs.
Anyways, just a thought.
stop requesting the article so I can read it!
Hardware sites would do well to post more useful reviews like these that look at more than just raw performance numbers. When trying to resolve a recent video capture issue with my geforce4, I came across all the reviews I had read when shopping for the card. It occurred to me that none of them focused on anything other than 3d performance. They all mentioned the video-in, video-out capabilities, but only in passing. It wasn't tested, examined, or explained in any way. If I had had the foresight to see this back then, I might have bought a different card.
I wonder if they were running 5400 or 7200 rpm hard drives.. :)
I have used WD drives almost exclusively for years. In fact, I presently have a 180MB drive (yes megaBYTE, it's about 8years old) right next to me that hasn't stopped at all in the last 867 days. Thanks Novell!
Sander Sassen owns Hardware Analysis.
I got +1 Insightful on an FP yesterday. BTW it really was FP.
Funny that the Insightful mod has disappeared today. Anyway, Here's the link.
Earth, 1956 AC, IBM 305 RAMAC:
The 350 Disk File consisted of a stack of fifty 24" discs that can be seen to the left of the operator in the above picture. The capacity of the entire disk file was 5 million 7-bit characters, which works out to about 4.4 MB in modern parlance. This is about the same capacity as the first personal computer hard drives that appeared in the early 1980's, but was an enormous capacity for 1956. IBM leased the 350 Disk File for a $35,000 annual fee.
When I bought components for my powerful home computer, I made sure to check the manufacturer-specified dB levels on everything, since my computer would be 5 feet from my bed. I had built a computer the year before that I hardly ever used, primarily because it was too damn loud to leave on all the time. I was able to find a "whisper-soft" 431W Enermax power supply, some "silent" case fans, the relatively quiet Volcano 6Cu+ HSF, and you can bet I'm not displeased with the four 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV's I bought (they are almost too quiet to be audible on their own, and definitely quieter than the HSF and case fans, which drown them out anyway). Plus they are fast as heck. So for me, noise was actually a big concern (not as much as price/performance, but definitely a factor).
lynx -dump "http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/
- El riesgo siempre vive - Private J. Vasquez
I'm one of the growing number of people who have an entire TERABYTE -- yes, an entire TERABYTE of hard drives; 9 Western Digital Special Edition 120GB's, to be exact, for $1500 total.
:)
I've downloaded and installed EVERYTHING (6 different OS's, too) I can find and so far have used only about 800GB or so
I'm glad they're starting to review noise as a factor, since with the extra cooling installed, the computer sounds almost like a vacuum cleaner, especially with the 550W power supply it takes to power the things. The drives individaully would be really quiet, but with all the cooling and such I have installed, it's almost as loud as this miniature fan I keep nearby.
The fans drown out the crunching when people are grabbing everything off every hd on p2p programs, but all the noise is still worth it when I can call forth any song, music video, movie, or just about anything else at a whim.
Honestly - I do not feel the need of anything faster than the slowest 5400 RPM HDD for now - my PC has gobloads of RAM and I can make use 128MB-per-HDD as buffer. Easily.
What worries me is, the faster you spin, the more catastrophic a failure is.
What I DO care about, is reliability and shock resistance. If anyone sells a reliable HDD that would survive 5-inch drop and still operate with all my data intact, I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
Compared to my data, the HDD and the theoretical time that can be saved with higher speed worth REALLY little. Almost nothing.
Moderation Totals: Interesting=1, Informative=1, Funny=1, Overrated=1, Total=4.
NICE.....
Why hasn't anyone developed a device that has DIMM slots for PCXXXX RAM and an IDE/Firewire/USB interface on it?
Seems like that would be the way to go... stick a battery on it, and give it an external power supply... then you have VERY fast and extremely reliable storage. (As long as it is powered).
I have had enough hard drives fail that I would love to have one... maybe once MRAM comes out these devices will start popping up.
Ryan
IntroductionBy: Sander Sassen
A modern harddisk is not that different, mechanically, from the first generation of harddisks that debuted with the IBM PC in the '80s. Today's harddisks are also mechanical parts that use spinning platters and read/write heads to store or read information from them. That also explains why harddisks haven't seen the rapid pace of innovation as for example CPUs have; simply because the mechanics are holding the harddisk back from making similar leaps in performance. But to be honest that's not entirely accurate, modern harddisks could be substantially faster, but not without either driving up the price significantly or introducing unwanted side effects.
One of these side effects is excessive noise; because a harddisk has a number of spinning and moving parts it is virtually impossible to make a harddisk noiseless. Anything you'll do to counter the noise will either influence the performance, drive up the price, or make the harddisk physically larger. For example one way to reduce the noise would be to reduce the rpm of the platters which would mean we'd end up with a slower harddisk overall. And vice versa, by increasing the rpm of the platters we'll get a better performing harddisk but the noise level will also increase.
Naturally we could counter the noise production by adding sound insulation. Unfortunately insulation is not the preferred way of tackling the noise production as it'll make the harddisk physically larger, and thus leave less room for storage capacity. Furthermore it also works as an insulator for the heat produced by the harddisk, which would then cut into the harddisk's MTBF, Mean Time Before Failure. That actually brings us to the second unwanted side effect of high-performance harddisks and that's excessive heat production.
Modern IDE harddisks feature platters that revolve at either 5400 or 7200-rpm and thus revolve at about half the speed of the fastest SCSI harddisks that top out at 15.000-rpm. The main difference is that these SCSI harddisks are used in professional applications such as database servers where noise- and heat production are second to performance, and thus these levels are substantially higher than consumer level products. In consumer level PCs however heat production is becoming an increasingly important issue. PCs continue to get smaller and CPUs on average dissipate more than 50-watts of heat, so the system temperature will rise significantly if a harddisk is mounted with excessive heat production. In the following pages we'll take a look at all recent 5400 and 7200-rpm harddisks from IBM, Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung with a focus on noise and heat production as well as overall performance.
Next >>
Noise ProductionBy: Sander Sassen
As mentioned a modern harddisk still is a mechanical device, and as with most mechanical devices it is hard to completely cancel out all noise. One part that contributes to the noise significantly is the spindle, which drives the platters. The spindle is usually direct-driven and has an rpm of 5400 or 7200-rpm, which translates itself into a high-pitched whine. Harddisks that use high-quality bearings or even fluid-bearings are less noisy in this respect than others that use conventional bearings. Then there are the harddisk platters; due to the high speed at which they revolve they generate both noise and heat. And naturally the more platters, higher capacity harddisks, the more heat and noise are generated. Due to space constraints modern harddisks don't use more than four platters which does limit the heat and noise production to a certain level.
Fortunately a manufacturer has a number of options at hand to reduce the noise level of the spindle and platters, such as using high-quality bearings or decoupling the spindle and spindle-motor from the harddisk casing by using a sound and vibration dampening gasket. Of course another way to reduce the noise and heat production would be to use less platters of a higher density, as this will not influence the storage capacity of the disk.
Fig 1. The interior of a typical harddisk whilst operating. This movie requires the Windows Media player to be installed and requires a broadband connection for streaming playback.
But there's other moving parts that also contribute to a harddisk's noise production; the read/write heads are notorious for causing the 'rattling sound' many harddisks make when accessing your data. And again the manufacturer has a number of options to reduce this noise which usually mean that the heads are operated less abruptly when sweeping across the platters. For example by smoothing out read/write operations by slowing the heads down when they need to reverse direction or by intelligently combining read and write operations and thus reducing head movement. Unfortunately many of these noise reducing measures do affect the harddisk' performance and some can even be set arbitrarily through software to optimize for a specific application.
Tom's Hardware has a lot of really good harddrive reviews which focus on heat, performance, AND noise. You should check out their storage review section. It's very good.
-=Lothsahn=-
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This article was posted just a few hours after I ordered a new hard drive.
Fortunately I ordered Seagate's ST380021A Barracuda IV which came out pretty respectably. The main concern I had was noise (as my computer is next to my bed and I can't sleep with it on) and performance. I wasn't worried about heat too much as I don't overclock my compter.
Heat ProductionBy: Sander Sassen
Any part that is operated above its maximum temperature rating over a prolonged period of time will see its MTBF drastically lowered. All parts that make up a modern PC have such a maximum temperature rating, most of which are around 50...65 degrees Celsius, or 122...149 degrees Fahrenheit. An average CPU dissipates about 50-watts of heat inside a PC case and is one of the major contributors to a rise in system temperature which could easily be as high as 45 C/ 113 F. If the case temperature is already that high, some of the parts of the PC could already be operating at or above their maximum temperature rating.
Especially 7200-rpm harddisks are suspect as they are known to get substantially hotter than their 5400-rpm counterparts. Naturally 7200-rpm and multiple platters all contribute to more heat being produced, as the spinning platters get hot due to the friction with the surrounding air, the more platters and the higher the rpm, the more heat. Unfortunately we can't simply say that 7200-rpm harddisks get hotter than 5400-rpm harddisks by default as our measurements will clearly show, but we'll get to that in the next few pages.
Harddisk Interior
Fig 2. The interior of a typical 80GB 7200-rpm harddisk, in this case a Maxtor D740X. This harddisk features two platters with 40GB/platter density.
What is important to consider though is the question whether the harddisk doesn't get too hot when mounted inside the PC. Most modern harddisks have a maximum operating temperature ranging from 55 to 65 C or 131 to 149 F, and if operated above that temperature you're really putting yourself at risk of losing valuable data or a harddisk malfunction. If the system temperature is already at 45 C/ 113 F the harddisk could very well be operating over it's maximum temperature, which will cut into the disk's MTBF and reliability significantly.
Test Results, Noise ProductionBy: Sander Sassen
If we take a look at noise production it is clear that the majority of hardisks tested score around the 43 dB(A) mark with only the Western Digital 1200JB being somewhat noisier at 47.1 dB(A). The only harddisks that scored significantly lower were Seagate's ST380020A and ST380021A, better known as the Barracuda IV. The Barracuda IV actually was quite an engineering marvel as it had some of the lowest noise levels we measured and yet offered performance that was just slightly below the fastest 7200-rpm harddisks. But also the excellent IBM 120GXP and Western Digital 800JB fared quite well in the noise department, not really whisper-quiet, but not exactly noisy either.
I haven't had a single WD drive that didn't turn into worthless slag within six months.
I've two IBM Deathstars that have been performing flawlessly for quite some time now. (And with mad performance, I might add.)
On the other hand, I've known people who swear by WD drives, and have had nothing but problems from their Deathstars.
Why is this? None of the people I know like hurling their drives against a wall or anything.
Simple. Production runs. A machine fscks up, you get crap. Luck of the draw, and all.
Another vote here for the 'Cuda, they are soo much quieter than the previous generation disks, and very cheap and fast too. At my work we install them exclusively and we've never had one fail yet, easily 350 pieces without one DOA or return. They are especially well suited to iMacs and other Apple machines with no or few fans.
We have noticed TONs of old Quantum drives failing this year and I just have a strange feeling about those new Maxtors that look like the old style Quantum design. No comment on WD , as I have only replaced, never sold them. People seem to have very mixed luck with IBM lately, so it's hard to recommend anything other than the Seagate. Thank you to Seagate for sucking less.
"[7200 rpm disks] are generally too costly, or a bit overkill, for mundane office applications such as word processing or sending emails"
I'm having enough trouble just finding 5400 rpm disks. The performance (speed-wise) is more than enough for me, and I'd rather go with cool and quiet. The cost difference between 5400 and 7200 drives is marginal (a few bucks).
The thing is, there aren't many 5400 rpm disks around anymore and only sizes up to 80 GB. I'd rather have one big disk than two or three small ones (both heat and noise adds up), but I can't find any 5400 rpm disks at, say, 120GB or so, while 7200 rpm disks are available up to 200GB or so. And as long as the 7200 rpm drives are as hot and noisy as they are, I would rather have 5400 rpm disks.
Perhaps there are larger 5400 rpm disks, but I have yet to see them at any reseller nearby.
There are 010 kinds of people. Those who understand octal, those who don't, and 06 other kinds of morons.
http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/3494/
IBM says not to use their drives more than 8 hours per day, max 333 hours month since they're good for only non-continuous desktop duty.
I must say, I have the Seagate Barracuda IV and it is everything you would think it to be. It is pretty damn fast for 7200rpm and is completely silent! I suggest getting this to anyone in need of a new (or quiet) drive.
But, they aren't as fast as 3.5" drives.
Maybe you could do an IDE RAID setup to combat that?
....when the sounds of IBM's 20MB drive reading or writing could be felt in your teeth...
Ahh, those were the days.
... and I'm here to inventory your terabyte array for for software piracy.
Thanks you.
Tomshardware.com always includes heat and noise in their HDD reviews. Same with their reviews of heat sinks. I even got some links from one of their articles on how to make a PC (power supply, HDD, CPU fan, cdrom, everything) that is dead silent.
I don't have those links at work or I'd include them.
Anyway, I now have a much quieter cpu fan and I am so happy. I might even buy some silent case fans and be able to use my rediculously loud Tornado case again.
Posting bandwidth usage figures on your website is just asking everyone to click "reload" on their browsers as many times as possible :-)
Check out the top of each page:
And they include heat and noise reports in their excellent reviews. Highly recommended for any HDD purchase.
Forgive me if I'm missing the point, but I can't see that choosing a hard disk on its noise production is in any way sensible.
Noise is damned important in many applications. TiVo, for instance, needs lots of capacity, but speed is not a critical issue. Any modern 5,400RPM drive is more than sufficient. Who wants to watch a movie and listen to a loud whine from a disc drive? Also, since TiVos tend to live in "entertainment centers" and have limited cooling, heat is a big concern.
Another good example is my firewall machine. It runs my mail server, FTP server, and web server. It performs NAT for my network. The a-number-1 thing that I want from that machine (outside of reliability) is quiet. None of the applications on that machine get much action. My web server is a private page that lets me look at my system temperatures and voltages -- so it does not generate a lot of hits. The mail server serves me and a few freinds. But the machine is in my office running 24/7. I don't want to hear a loud hard drive, nor do I want to put six fans in the case to extract heat. So I run a slow, low wattage Duron (650mhz) and a 20GB, 5,400RPM hard drive.
It's all additive. The machine on which I work is loud enough because of my "need-for-speed." It's got multiple fans, hard drives, etc. And it sounds like it. The quieter I can make the other machines, the better off I will be.
{* Disclaimer - if you accidentally duct tape your CPU fan and your PSU inlets, please try and smother the flames with your body because (1) No one else should be hurt because of your "specialness", and (2) You'll be doing all of us a favour. Either way, don't blame me. *}
The easiest fix: Take some foam padding, preferably the antistatic kind that most hardware ships in these days, and line your case panels with a layer or two. It'll cut down on a good portion of the noise, and it'll improve your airflow (you didn't really think that air was supposed to go through those decorative holes, did you?) Be sure to keep it thin on the back side, next to the mobo. I know it says antistatic on the box, but do you really want anything touching your mobo?
Next, replace your damn PSU. Standard ones are way too damn noisy. I don't have any links handy (I'm at work), but they are plentiful and easy to find. Oh, and say "damn" alot. It helps.
Getting more in-depth, remove your peripheral drives (CD, HD, etc), and put them back in with rubber washers both between the drive and case, and between the screw and case. It cuts down on vibrations significantly.
Tie up your loose cables. Sounds silly, but I've found that in several systems with significant airflow, they were either moving around or causing turbulence. Either make or buy rounded IDE cables for the best flow.
If you have a very noisy harddrive, yank it from that small and normally loose 3 1/2" bracket and put it in one of your 5 1/4" bays with the help of drive brackets. Insulate around it with antistatic foam padding, use rubber washers, put an ultraquiet mini fan behind it, set to pull air(that old socket 7 fan you have lying around will do just fine). Finally, remove the bezel in front of it, drill some small holes for airflow, insulate with foam padding (remove the padding around the holes ((yes, it is sad that I have to point that out)) ), and pop it back in. Voila! Thicker padding to cut down on sound, it's in the 5 1/4" drive section, which I find is much sturdier and less prone to rattle, and the fan will keep it cooler than it would have been before.
Consider dropping that 52x CD. Sure, it's impressive, but you install all your games with max install, right? (right??) Or better yet, go buy software that will copy your CD to the HD and then subst the directory to a drive letter. Voila! CD at HD speeds. Replace the 52 with something more conservative, and you'll notice a big difference (and lower spinup time)
crud, "subst", I just dated myself...
Consider spring-mount screws for your case fans. I have a whole bag of them, but I'll be darned if I can remember who made them. They're basically just a short metal or plastic spring with a screw at each end. One end screws into the hole on the fan, the other into the case, voila, instant buffer against vibrations.
If things are still too bad for you, consider an external case mod. The quietest I ever did was to replace all of the metal panels on the case with 1/2" beechwood (damn, but it was pretty), but not all of us have the time and patience to work up something like that. The easiest is to take your panels off, and slap some starch/water paste on them. Next, take some thick cloth (or a few layers of thin cloth, if you feel the need to be difficult), load it up with the paste, and then just slap it on your panel. Make sure it's all wrinkly and folded n' chit. Let it dry, and the cloth should stick on just fine, adding another layer of sound barrier for ya. DISCLAIMER 1: This has been known not to stick on some of the new, shiny, smooth cases. DISCLAIMER 2: Take the panels off of your PC BEFORE you start slathering them with starch. Or, at the very least, remember to turn your PC off first. ;-)
Finally, try putting your PC on a phone book or something similar. Sounds silly, but it dulls the noise that resonates into the floor/desk. If it makes a difference for you, then build something more permanant for your case to sit on (or, at the very least, give it some ultracool extra-long legs like the AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars.... complete with little lazer guns on the CD drive... )
Lastly, note that a heckuvalot of the noise you hear could be from your monitor, too. But I will avoid monitor mods for today, lest some yahoo stick a phillips through his tube and show up at my doorstep, ready to share the tale. (it's happened, and I swear he was still smoking).
Hope this helps!
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Why is it that all of these manufacturers use the same 5400 and 7200 rpm speeds for their drives? Why couldn't one manufacturer put out their drives at, say, 6000 and 8000 rpm (from a marketing standpoint, this would be beneficial: kind of like Intel using MHz as a benchmark for comparative "performance" against AMD).
Is there a good reason for this uniformity across manufacturers? Do they use the same motors from a 3rd party supplier? What gives?
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
The most quiet drives, the seagate Barracuda IV atas have a problem in Raid configurations. When used in a Raid configuration, the performance is less than a single drive by itself. Raid is not officially supported by this drive. More here.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Since things seem to be getting bogged down on Hardware Analysis's end, here are two mirrors:
1. Earlham College
2. UW-Madison
These are in PDF format, which I converted from the printable HTML provided on the website. It is missing one eye-candy picture of a hard-drive's interior.
Because I tried looking them up, and some manufacturers sound sane. Others do not. 5400 and 7200 rpm drawing the *same* power? 1, 2 and 3 platter disks drawing the same? WTF. Seriously, putting a simple ampmeter in there would be great data.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One comes up on Pricewatch and Google, which frequently highlights vendors, has only brought up articles, reviews, passing references for the ST3120023AS
Note: The second Seagate link gives some idea of where SATA is going, starting at 150MBytes/sec external transfer speed, yet their tech spec indicates 150Mbits/sec. So far benchs show no advantage, unless you prefer/need the wiring change. Your milage may vary.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
everyone who complains about there hardrives being to noisy are the same pansies who buy foreign ricerockets with no power in their engines
You should acount for noise and vibration if you are going to do that, they can have a large amount of energy too...
Also a grainy texture will not in any way effect a surface temperature probe. It will effect heat transfer, and that will make it take longer to reach the temperature, but heat will transfer until the temps are the same, it's HS level physics.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Something I am surprised nobody has brought up yet is that the frequency of noise which a drive produces is as important (if not more) than the absolute sound pressure level of the noise.
Human ears are more sensitive to midrange sounds and high-frequency noise tends to be more grating than lower frequency "whooshes" at the same sound pressure level.
Much like higher revving engines, higher RPM drives naturally produce higher-frequency noise, so 37dB on a 15k RPM drive (e.g. newest Seagate Cheetah) will typically be more noticeable than 37dB on a 7200rpm drive (older IBM 75GXP drives).
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Unnamed Geology Dept. decided to set up a GIS lab and unfortunately they were advised to buy Compaqs with Western Digital drives. Of 14 computers:
1 - DOA
4 - Drives operate in PIO mode (no UDMA)
1 - Yesterday decided C:\ Corrupted run ScanDisk
models WD600BB and WD800BB.
We all know the problems with IBM GXP hard drive technology don't we?
IBM has just released a new series of desktop HD's, supposed to be faster and make less noise than the competition, blah blah blah...IBM Press Release
Even their newest 120gig HD still have reliability problems. Mine ended up with bad sectors in one month of less than 8 hours a day usage. They need to be sued for selling defective product designs.
As I'm sure is the case for quite a few other people who decided to take on a little bit of overclocking, I must say "What HD?". You mean that very faint whirring I hear when I turn my computer on before the 50 dB rocket engine I have strapped to my CPU spins up? Oh how I would love to get the same cooling effect I have now with only the noise of a few HDs, I think I would have to kiss someone. P.S. I think I'm going deaf (moreso in the ear closer to the computer
I think they way they measured heat was a little strange. They just ran it in an open room and measured the temperature of the top of the drive. Why didn't they just measure the total power used during the test hour. That seems easier and more accurate to me.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
I've got said hde: WDC WD800BB ATA DISK
:(
See my dmesg
Hopefully this is not as bad as it looks
hde: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=155061/16/63, UDMA(100)
hde: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hde: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
hde: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hde: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Is the IBM model they recommend at the end one of those which some are calling the 'Deathstar' for its ability to self-destruct?
I wonder if any review of hard drives can be reliable without running the drives 24/7 for a year. I've had two Deathstars go on me, though another is still hanging in there. The reason I have more than one is that yes, they seemed pretty impressive at first, and I wasn't the only one buying them and recommending them. But there seems to be a big difference between 'at first' and 'a year down the road'.
I've notice that over time every drive I've ever had eventually gets noisy as the bearings wear.
This can take only a few months before that drive you couldn't hear over the top of your CPU fan starts emmitting a steady whine that you can hear 3 rooms away.
There's been a few reviews of noise levels in drives, all of them seem to cover a brand new drive.
Anyone bother to do a follow up, say 6-12 months later?
Anyone have any drives that are still quiet after a year?
GloomE
I have always bought Seagate, and have never had problems. Scary as it may seem, I have a 850MB hd that I installed in my GF's system but mistakenly had the IDE cable offset by one col of pins (I missed two). Mind you this was done, in a dark apt, while the HD was already installed in the case, so it was a bit of stupidity on my end. However, the HD worked great! for months! until I went into it to add a CDROM and found the cable was off by two pins. I had to bend back the two pins, but after I reconnected the drive and it still works to this day!
Bought two Quantum Fireball LS (20GB) drives, and not after a few months the first died (which ruined my RAID). Lesson learned, going back to Seagate.
Keep up the great work guys! you rock!
E
If you follow discussions at other forums for ReplayTV and TiVo owners, you already know that in that situation you don't really care about performance. A 5400rpm drive can easily handle the job. However, noise is critical, and hence, some of these systems don't have fans, making heat also critical--if you upgrade with a drive that runs hotter than the original, you're likely to have random failures.
In some cases, you have to worry about heat, noise, and performance. For example, with standalone or portable digital audio recorders, such as those from Roland and Yamaha. While some of them do have fans built in, they're usually pretty small and form factor for these things means that circulation isn't very good. Noise is an issue because you don't want some drive chattering around while your singer is singing the take of her life. And performance is an issue, simply because of the throughput demands that digital audio makes on a system.
With a computer-based recording system, such as ProTools, performance is the key factor. Noise is still an issue, but it's not uncommon for the machine to be in a separate room from the microphones. Heat is less an issue because of the circulation and fans available in the typical computer case.
In any case, reviews like this are a very welcome addition for electronic musicians!
In line with what they other posts said, non-blocking I/O can be accomplished by letting the DMA controller take over transfers while the CPU does other things. However, I think the advantage that SCSI has over IDE that you're thinking of is that SCSI can have multiple outstanding transactions on a bus at once while IDE cannot. In other words, you can send a read request to one SCSI disk and, while it's being processed, send out another one to another SCSI disk on the same bus. With IDE, you have to wait to send a request to a new device on a channel until the last one finishes.
I'm not 100% sure about this, so if you need to make decisions based on this information I suggest you do some research elsewhere. You might want to check out the online pc guide.
Why would anyone care about HD noise than heat disscipation these days? HD made from the last 4 years are virtually no match for the fan noise.
Most drives get noisier over time. I've had many drives that were nearly silent when I purchased them, but after not much time they start to get noticeably louder, until they're unbearable. Especially Maxtor. :> Anyway, since this article (and all the others that I've seen) don't address noise levels after a month or six, they're really not all that helpful.
I've given up trying to find a quiet enough drive for my living room and just put the living room system in another room (the basement) with long cables. It's a bit awkward (though will be better once I acquire an external DVD-RW) but a much simpler solution.
I have a very old K6-2 based system with an entire 3 gigabytes of hard disk. Already my apartment heats up too much, and the CPU fan is much louder than any of the disks in this study.
I want to slowly update components. I'll probably get one of the quietest disks, but what about microprocessor? I understand most are much hotter than my K6-2, and therefore I'd presume the CPU fans would make a hell of a racket. (Mine already does). I'd like to minimize this.
Know where I can get quiet power supplies? What brand+models are quiet?
My current one isn't that noisy but it's an old one for the days of the P3.
The recent 350W and 400W power supplies for P4s/Athlons PCs seem to have roaring fans.
Link.
Which is why it is so surprising that the playstation 2 has a cooling fan. Ok for games, lousy for DVDs.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
I occasionally will hear hard drive chatter, but any sort of stock case/MPU fan drowns it out.
"Noise, Heat, and Performance"
...factors that make a good relationship.
And just when we installed a new box with dual 1.3GHz CPUs, 240GB of RAID0+1 storage and 1GB of RAM (see here) and thought we were ready for just about anything the Slashdot Mob comes along and brings it down to it's knees!
Thanks guys, I'm happy to report the server pulled through although we had to limit the no. of simul. connects to keep things afloat. We'll be going over the server logs today to see where there's room for improvement, as there's some parameters we'd like to change in order to handle such loads better in the future.
Thanks and kind regards,
Sander Sassen
Email: ssassen@hardwareanalysis.comVisit us at: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com
Actually on my 40G Deskstar (which was just replaced under warrenty), the mechanism worked, but the logic board went bad. Drive would run, but the bios wouldn't detect it.
The IBM 120GXP (IC35L120) in the test supports this, and this implies that Seagate are doing this kind of "seek shaping" now and plan to extend the facility to OEMs, so that they can customize acoustic performance for the application e.g. PVR. Where possible, the review tests should have been done using either extreme. (They don't say whether the drives were seeking during the noise test, though. I hope they were, otherwise the noise tests would be half-baked.)
(this is not a
I have seen this statement in reference to computer fans so many times, as someone who has worked in aeroacoustic modeling for a while, I am appalled by the lack of knowledge exhibited by most, generally intelligent and well informed,
An example that comes to mind is jet engines (that is where my aeroacoustic experience was). Next time you are at the airport listen to the jets. When they are idling at the gate, there is a whine (more than anything else) that is the fan at the front of the engine. When they throttle up for take off the noise keeps on whining, but the roar that grows is turbulence in the shear layer formed at the nozzle exit.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
What? Do you watch DVDs while holding the PS2 up to your ear? It really isn't that loud.
Yeah, SpinRite looks like a really good program, but it doesn't work on NTFS-formatted drives. So much for that idea. Guess I'll just have to let my data fail the old-fashioned way.
[insert witty comment here]
The idea is to have something so the you do not have to burn a ten dollar bill every time you do a test.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away from
the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; someone loaded Star
Trek 3.2 into our video processor.
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