Video Storage And Hard Drive Manufacturers

IrateSurf writes "A new column posted over at the Storage Supersite questions whether or not PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) are good for the hard drive industry. It's interesting, considering topics like whether the noise of a hard drive is worse than a VCR. The discussion is a response to an earlier column talking about the bad market for hard drive makers."

Comments

my hard drives

[Vodak]

Yeah Hard drive noise is bad but it's nothing like it used to be. I remember some of the older drives I had that made so much noise it scared away my cat. Of course I used to buy crappy hardware so the drives were bad to begin with.

HDD noise

[mike449]

I've bought a Seagate HDD with fluid bearings recently, and I am very impressed. I don't hear it at all, except when it spins up. Its noise is well below the CPU fan noise (and I have a quiet Zalman one).
My concern about the PVR application is HDD reliability, not the noise.

Re:HDD noise

[gordyf]

New drives have varying acoustic states which can be changed with manufacturer-provided software.

IBM drives, for instance, have two modes, full-performance mode and quiet mode. Performance mode has the usual seek noise, although all modern drives are quite quiet, but quiet mode is absolutely silent. Even with my ear inches from the drive, I can't hear it seeking at all. It's eerie when you're loading windows and you can't hear your drive - makes you think it locked up. :)

You can use the "IBM Feature Tool" to manage IBM drives' acoustic management, along with monitoring drive temperature and setting power-saving modes. Maxtor drives, from what I've heard, have three modes, quiet, performance and a blend of the two.

The schemes used to reduce seek noise introduce a slight penalty to seek time, however, but in many applications seek time is not that important (such as PVRs, where high throughput is needed). Quiet mode makes defragging take noticably longer, though.

Re:HDD noise

[mackstann]

yep yep, the Barracuda IV's and V's are amazingly quiet. You simply do not hear them, under any normal circumstances. to hear the drive, you need an absolutely silent room, and a silent or nearly silent computer, and then if you try hard enough you can hear the seeks going tick tick, but its still faint. if you put your ear on the thing, you'll definitely hear them, but its impressive how quiet it is. but if you have *any* other noise in the room, even just low level background noise, you'll never hear the thing.

My name is mackstann and I'm a Barracuda IV user.

Fluid Bearings?

[deathcow]

I have to say, bought three of these Seagate Barracuda IV's with the new fluid bearings, and they are extremely quiet. I wouldn't see one of these drives raising anyones hackles. Hell, have you heard how loud some DVD players are?? I've got a couple that the entire chassis vibrates!

Re:Sound proofing

[dpp]

If the sound does become a problem, how about adding a little sound proof (dampening) enclosure around it?

I have my hard drive in an acoustic enclosure from www.quietpc.com, and have been very happy with it. The only drawbacks are that hotter drives may overheat, and you need to put the whole thing in a 5.25" drive bay.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

HD noise? Please. Everytime I used to hit stop on my VCR, it clanked. Eject a tape, it clicks. Hit stop, it clicks. Rewind is about as loud as any fan setup on a home media pc as you are going to get. Tapes are freakin noisy as they come.

Meanwhile, you can buy a mini itx case for $70 or less with a dc-dc power supply (although that buzzes a tad) and an epia 900 (933 mhz) and that's pretty quiet. Get some 5400 rpm hard drive or boot and save over a network.

You can buy 200 gb 7200 rpm special edition/8mb cache western digitals for $250 or less after rebate nowadays. I just bought 2 in the past 2 weeks for recording use (I use a Hauppauge 250; I don't use it as a PVR really re the timeshifting). They are exclusively for video storage. I intend to buy 2 more in the next month, since maxtor seems to be dragging their feet on their 320s (I need capacity, not speed).

Noise

[mgs1000]

This might be off-topic, but...

My wife complained that the Tivo (Sony SAT-T60) in our bedroom made too much noise at night and it bothered her. I replaced the stock cooling fan in it with one of those quiet models, and it cut down on the noise enough to where the noise from the Tivo is imperceptible to her.

Anyway, the point of the story is that noise from a PVR's hard drive is not such a big a deal to my wife, and I suspect that most consumers wouldn't disagree. (They just need to put quiter fans in 'em)

(BTW, this Tivo has the stock hard drive, nothing special)

What noise?

[Jahf]

I have a first gen Tivo with a cheap second hard drive. The only time I've ever heard any mechanical noise from it is when the entire house was empty and nothing was running. It's quieter than my amplifier most times. If I stick my head to the back of the Tivo I can hear the drives and fan, but that's the only time.

My VCR on the other hand makes a pretty massive amount of sound on fast forwarding, rewinding, and when dis/engaging the heads. Hands down it's the noisiest appliance we own.

This guy either got a model with a total clunker of a drive or he's nuts.