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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."
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.
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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.
Amen to that. You'll notice that they give high marks to the WD800BB (7200RPM, 80GB, 2MB cache). I bought this drive last March, and it served me well: fast and reasonably quiet. However, in July, it died. Corrupted boot sector, various bad sectors, etc.
Unfortunately, this was not a one-off manufacturing error. A friend purchased the same drive about a month later, and his died the same crash-and-burn death as mine about two weeks later. Sounds like these drives just suck. I'm using the replacement they sent me, but only until I can get the scratch together to replace it with a Seagate.
Caveat emptor on these suckers.
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.
Platypus Technology does make something similar. They have both internal PCI and external enclosures to just hold sticks of ram; some models have stadard hard drives for times of power loss. Unfortunately under linux it requires a kernel module (and at the time I was using them, if I upgraded the kernel the company had to compile a new module to match). They fly though, they're sooo fast. Really nice for my mail queues.
Storagereview.com has had noise and heat statistics for years.
Actually, it is a better reference than this quoted article because you can tell SR.com to compare all the drives you are interested in purchasing and get good* benchmarks, heat/noise, and can sort by specific benchmark.
Go to the website, click "database" (near the top) and choose your criteria. In ten seconds you can find out the noise/heat/speed of every drive SR has ever reviewed, with a rather nice labelled bar graph for clarity.
You can also visit the forums and get advice from some of the most knowledgeable people in the IT industry, and get information that is difficult to come by anywhere else--for example, that Samsung makes the most reliable (albeit close to the slowest) IDE hard drive. SR was also the first to discover that Seagate planned to reduce their warranty and that there are terrible SCSI performance bugs in Windows XP, among others.
A very good resource, and it's been slashdotted without the server being brought to its knees. (It runs Linux/Apache/PHP)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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.