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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."
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
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
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
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!
More and more as time goes by (and drive size increases, and prices drop) I'm seeing much higher percentages of drives with manufacturing defects, or drives that develop errors after several months of typical (home, office, small business, small enterprise server, etc.) use.
I don't even have to resort to 'naming names' - they're all proving bad lately. It's not just our equipment, either. We're handling (on behalf of our customers) RMAs for several different computer resellers in our area, most of whom do not use our supplier(s).
I'm sure anybody would understand the significance of this problem after you've told your tenth customer in a month that their data is irretreivable, AND that they have to wait 4-6 weeks for a new unit or purchase a new one. (Don't even mention data recovery - Joe Homeuser or Suzy Smallbusiness just can't afford thousands of dollars, but it doesn't make their data any less important than a mega-corporation)
I've got a dandy of a hard drive on the bench right now, awaiting customer authorization for replacement. Scandisk froze solid when attempting to diagnose it, so I slave mounted it and began extracting data. After about 200MB or thereabouts, it made the loudest screeching noise I think I've ever heard.
The drive was manufactured less than two years ago, purchased only 1.5 years back.
It's a sad state that the computer industry is in right now, with most components suffering the same fate as hard disk drives. I must replace two power supplies per week, it seems. Granted, we're making a killing on labour on all this defective hardware (why the stores they purchased this equipment from won't help them, I'll never know, and I'm too frightened to investigate) - which, in hindsight, is probably the reason behind the "So what if it only lasts for one year?" line of thinking.
If manufacturers don't have refurb drives or services available, or if they won't replace a defective unit with the next-closest-piece available; that's not our problem, it's clearly a problem with their company policy. Being mechanical, drives are easy enough to repair.
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KDS (Korea Data Systems) still offers three year warranties on their products, and I'm still extremely ecstatic with their work (which is why they're the first monitor we reccomend, and the monitor we include with our systems). The monitor we're using on our accounting machine (KDS VS-7e) is now almost exactly 3 years, 1 month old. On (literally) the last day of the warranty, I phoned them with a request for an RMA number, due to the control buttons functioning erratically. They gave me the number and I shipped it to them four days after the manufacturer warranty expired. Since I got the number in time (and didn't have to wait a month for it, like one particular HDD manufacturer I don't care to name (or deal with!)); on a Tuesday. It was back on our desk by the Friday of that very same week - return shipping paid in full by KDS. We're working on our 90-day warranty extension right now, but I don't forsee any future problems.
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So, all in all, I'm extremely dissapointed with hard drive manufacturers, and judging by current industry trends I doubt very much the situation will improve.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
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).