Quiet Hard Drives - Samsung or Seagate or Hitachi?

[tony]

Can't really comment on how quiet my computer is, but I have taken steps to
reduce the noise; most recently, the installation of a Zalman 7000 HS/fan.
The only other fans in my system are in the Antec PSU, and they're set down
to minimum speed. So I think that my system is fairly quiet. It's also
fairly close to where I sit, in that I can reach over and install CD's in it
without really stretching, and I was running it with the cover off. All in
all, I think I'd know if it was making annoying noises.

To hear the Seagate idle seek noise you'd have to be doing nothing on the
PC that accesses the disk for the drive to go into it's idle seek mode, so
you'd have to sit and wait for it. On mine it only takes a minute or two
and then it does the annoying thing for up to a minute and repeats every
few minutes. Also, if you have any software that is accessing the disk
regularly, it won't go into idle mode and do the seeking (I'm actually
running a program to do access the disk every 45 seconds just to keep the
Seagate quiet, but that keeps it from spinning down also so I run the
program
when I'm logged on only. All in all, I should have to resort to such
things.)

Installing the Seagate drive made a HUGE difference to the sound levels of
my system, as I had a irritatingly noisy Maxtor drive that got replaced.
But that was a continous high-pitched noise on a 2 year old 7200 rpm drive.
In that drive, I could set the "Acoustic Management " something-or-other to
set for quiet or performance. Changing that made a difference in the seek
noise, but didn't do a thing for the high-pitched whine.

Well the only valid comparison between drives is between the newest
drives since only the newer ones have fluid bearings in them. The IBM
Deskstar that I replaced was whining like a jet engine too. My Seagate
is silent too when it's not fidgitting at idle. It just doesn't stay silent
for very
long.

Tony

 

[Kale]

Just bought a Samsung 160GB ATA 133 Spinpoint drive.

Have been very impressed by the near silent drive.

Of course, it replaced an IBM 75GB Deskstar (appropriately nicknamed the
Deathstar, as I have previously had two fail on me.)

But it's still quieter than the Seagate 80GB ATA 100. at least during Seek,
at idle, both are fairly comparable.

Kale

 

[Patrick]

I've really never considered anything other than Seagate, Western Digital or
(just lately) Maxtor. I'm certainly not going back to WD because of the
problems
I've had with those and the extreme amount of whining that I've observed
with
those drives as they age. Seagate is out because of the idle seek noise. My
only other choice is now Maxtor because I haven't tried those yet. Hopefully
that will work out for me. I understand that Maxtor has a utility that
allows you
to adjust the drive's SMART settings whereas Seagate does not.

Tony

I have run every thing, with 'everything', in some of my 47 computers,
here. You really need to observe the jumper settings for each drive!

Put any zip, or cdrom drives over on a different IDE than your hard
drives! Use an accessory controller board, if you have ata133 drives,
on any older main boards.

I do love those Seagate Cheetah 10,000 rpm SCSI drives, that work in any
system, with any OS, to access data in the 4-6 ms range! If you didn't
know, scsi drives do multi read/write operations, like IDE drives cannot
do, speeding up the entire computing experience!

I run knoppix installed Debian, on most computers.
http://knopper.net/knoppix Never crashes, no blue screens, no
destroyed hard drives, no virus' nor any w0rms... instantly recognizes
multiple processors, optimizes for Pentium, or, AMD cores, and has
114,680 FREE programs, games, down to me from the internet in minutes!

 

[William W. Plummer]

I do love those Seagate Cheetah 10,000 rpm SCSI drives, that work in any
system, with any OS, to access data in the 4-6 ms range! If you didn't
know, scsi drives do multi read/write operations, like IDE drives cannot
do, speeding up the entire computing experience!

The "multi read/write" feature might help if you are running a timesharing
system with more than one active job. But one user doing normal Office
applications causes the kernel to read-wait, write-wait, read-wait, ....
operation. Nothing gets overlapped. Also, back in 1971 I remember a paper
by Nelson of Digital that showed it takes more than 6 simulataneous
transfers to mask the track-track seek time. "SCSI" or more precisely,
fancy controllers, are unlikely to result in any noticable speed incread in
normal circumstances. OTOH, a 15,000 RPM disk with fast track switching
will provide a nice improvement.