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."

Comments

I have only one thing to say...

[keep_it_simple_stupi]

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.

Re:I have only one thing to say...

[Soko]

What did you say??? I can't hear you with all my disks spun up.

What about damned limes???? Death of information on no ice? Hunh??

Please repeat, and this time SPEAK LOUDER, PLEASE!!!

Soko

Re:I have only one thing to say...

[Sivar]

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)

Re:I have only one thing to say...

[Blkdeath]

... or it could be due to the fact that we've RMA'd dozens of drives of between 1 and 2 years of age from about four-five different drive manufacturers. Our stack of RMA sheets is starting to become cumbersome.

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.

<SUBJECT TYPE=ANALOGY>
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.
</SUBJECT>

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.

What I've known all along-

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

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.

Re:What I've known all along-

[tomhudson]

My 80Gig is in a removable caddy and during heavy defragging it will reach 137 degrees F. </quote

What you need to do RIGHT NOW is cut away most of the plastic from the bottom of the caddy, and not use the caddy's top. It'll run cooler, just from not being almost completely enclosed in plastic (those little slots they put in are so useless, and plastic is an insulator).

Also, the top of the caddy tends to block the breather hole, voiding your warranty.

Oh, and maybe move to a system that doesn't need defragging to improve performance (shameless plug for non-Windows OS of choice)

Re:What I've known all along-

[jandrese]

The problem is that everybody's sample set is too small to really make good reccomendations on this. Even people with computer labs or white box guys don't have anything close to a single percent of the number of drives at any time. For instance, I have two WD drives, an 800MB and a 2.1GB drive. Both still work great despite being abused for years. The Quantum drives however....

When it Slashdotted, here is the conclusion

[ites]

As evident from our benchmarks and the noise and heat production measurements the 80GB, Western Digital 800JB with 8MB cache and the 120GB, IBM 120GXP offer the best combination of performance, noise and heat levels. The IBM has our preference as it has the largest capacity and thus offers the best price/performance ratio.

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.

Re:When it Slashdotted, here is the conclusion

[Sokie]

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.

I too have been very impressed by the Barracuda IV's, they are put near silent and come in nice round 20GB increments. I've built probably a dozen systems with various sizes of this drive in them and have yet to see one go flaky.

As a white-box maker, performance isn't foremost in my selection criteria, reliability is and these Seagates are about the only drive I've used that I haven't had some sort of issue with. As an added bonus, they are usually $10-$15 cheaper than a Maxtor or WD of the same capacity and RPM.

Just my experience...ymmv....

-Sokie

Heat, noise critical for non-computer applications

[crow]

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.

Hmm

[Sludge]

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.

Ok, here's a question.

[Dirtside]

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.

Re:Ok, here's a question.

[RAMMS EIN]

``the CPU is able to keep processing while waiting for data from the hard drive.''
IDE drives can do this. It's called DMA.

Re:Ok, here's a question.

[thelexx]

The CPU will still be interrupted by disk I/O IRQ's unless you use SCSI. Lots of discrete disk accesses means lots of interrupting, which is why SCSI is used nearly exclusively in server environments.

Western Digital??

[bytesmythe]

From the article:
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.

Re:Western Digital??

[UncleOzzy]

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.

Obligatory SlashDotted Comment...

[suss]

I wonder what their server's harddisk temperature is right now... did they actually post this to slashdot on purpose?

Variable Speed?

[scott1853]

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 ;)

Re:Variable Speed?

[brooks_talley]

I see a couple of problems here. Not to say it can't be done, of course, but it's not going to be that easy:

- Bit densities are getting so high that minor fluctuations in drive speed could cause all sorts of read/write errors.

- All operating systems that I've ever used seem to hit the disk periodically during idle time. In order to get the benefit here, you'd have to have some threshold for activity before spinning up. However, that could be catastrophic for any kind of real-time app, like video encoding. Allowing the drive to spin down would limit the kinds of apps you could use.

It's definitely an interesting idea, but I think it may fall into the causes-more-problems-than-it-solves category.

Cheers
-b

Re:Variable Speed?

[Captain Morgan]

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?

The heads in your hard drive fly above the surface of the media due to the circulating air inside of the harddrive. Typically the heads are also engineered to fly at a specified height at all times given a specified amount of air moving through the drive. If you slowed the drive down the head would most likely fly lower or not fly at all, this would be quite bad for your data and the head.

Hard drive spindle motors are variable speed and are typically servo controlled for speed. Adjusting the speed wouldn't be a big deal except for the above.

[Pun about thinking outside the box]

[back_pages]

I'm a complete amateur when it comes to case design, so this may be a moronic question. Nevertheless, I brazenly forge ahead.

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!

Re:[Pun about thinking outside the box]

[miracle69]

I've got a case in my living room that I use to access my mp3 server.

I've replaced all the fans with Silencer fans (can't remember where I purchased them, but they were about 10 bucks a pop). I replaced the power supply fan with a silencer fan, added a second case fan, and changed the processor fan to a silencer fan - all rated at 26 dB, IIRC. I then added Dynamat to the inside of the case using their system. The machine is much quieter now. You can't hear the fans over the gentle gurgle of the fish tank nearby.

For my mp3 server, I picked up 5 120 GB WD 5400 HDs from Frys ($99 a pop a few weeks ago) as well as the 3 fan bay coolers for each drive ($15 bucks a pop). I ran the system without the fans briefly, and the top drive was extremely hot. Using the Antec bay coolers, they are all much cooler to the touch. The machine makes a noticible hum, but it sits tucked away in a cool closet, so noise isn't much of an issue there. I was, however, surprised at how quiet the machine was even with all the bay fans (15 bay fans alone, then a power supply and two processor fans (dual proc system)). Laminar flow reduces noise...

I suppose more people should know about..

[spinkham]

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.

Heat production and power consumption.

[ergo98]

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.

Forget everything else, try IBM 305 RAMAC

[jukal]

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.

Speed = wrong direction

[Wolfier]

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.

Re:On the other hand.

[scotch]

Oh look, a disagreement between a couple anonymous cowards - wow, this is really getting exciting!!!

Why no RAM -- IDE Devices?

[affegott]

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

Re:Why no RAM -- IDE Devices?

[ptudor]

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.

Re:Why no RAM -- IDE Devices?

[zulux]

Good idea, but once you implement it, be sure to benchmark it:

I had a PostreSQL database that was acting a bit slow on a FreeBSD box - and I had the bright idea: Hey! It must be the hard-drive that's holding the things up. So I created a file system in memory and put my PostgreSQL databse in the memory based 'disk.'

My fstab: /dev/ad0s1b /nbt/mfs mfs rw,-s131072 0 0

Imagine my suprise when over a four minute benchmarking session, the memory based disk only shaved off two seconds!

The moral of the story - if you have a good operating system (not Windows), then the added memory is probably better used by the computer itself than by creating a memory based disk. Modern OS do a great job of caching things.

If you have a sucky OS - like Windows, than this doesen't apply.

Re:Why no RAM -- IDE Devices?

[affegott]

Thousands isn't _that_ bad... but it would be a sure deal if they were around $500. :-)

How much power do they draw? How long could a fairly small (300VA) UPS keep it going?

Just wondering, maybe you have experience with that...

New at this, aren't you?

[fmaxwell]

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.

Quiet computing tips

[Cervantes]

After years of doing custom case mods, here's a few tips I've used over the years to make quieter computers:

{* 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!

What is it with these rpm speeds?

[debest]

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?

Buyer Beware

[eclectro]

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.

Mirror

[Door-opening Fascist]

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.

Re: isn't noise irrelevant?

[Antity]

I'm sleeping on top of my computer (bed over desk) with the PC sitting on the desk (Bigtower). Fans, IBM 40 gig, Maxtor 80 gig, acoustics management turned off. Never experienced any problems to sleep.

Your mileage may vary, of course. :-)

Frequency is as important as power

[ez76]

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).