17 Serial ATA Hard Drives Compared

TheRaindog writes "The Tech Report has an in-depth look at Maxtor's DiamondMax 11 hard drive that provides some interesting insight on how Seagate's recent acquisition can improve deficiencies in its own drives. More valuable, however, is the fact that the review offers a detailed comparison of 17 different Serial ATA drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital. Performance is compared across a wide range of typical desktop, multitasking, and multi-user loads, and noise levels and power consumption tests also provide interesting results. Definitely worth a look for anyone in the market for a new hard drive."

Comments

Loud noises!

[gr8whitesavage]

These things are loud, especially under load. As quiet as rainfall and as loud as normal conversation?

not really

[ElephanTS]

No they're not really. As a recording engineer and programmer HD noise is a concern of mine. My system has 4x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 and they really are quiet. I've used Barracudas for about 5 years now and this choice was based on HD noise figures from that time. 5 years ago the Barracudas were the quietist thing on the market and beat the competition hands down. Seems like now all the brands are pretty good - actually I'm pleasantly suprised how much improvement there's been judging by the figures. An increase of 3dB is not very much under load and nothing to get upset about. Some of my older drives would probably come in at 60-65dBA which was too loud. My PSU fan has to be the main culprit in any acoustic noise generated nowadays. As for the linked noise centre guides, these are the standard examples given everytime I've seen and there's no way the Barracuda 7200.9 is the same level as a normal conversation. To get this figure they probably average in all the normal silence of speech too I would guess. The band 50-60dBA is actually quite large in terms of SPL - every 6dB gain represents a doubling in power, every 12dB a quadrupling, so it's quite a big range.