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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.
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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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.