What's the quietest HD's you can get?

Combat Fighter

Combat Fighter

Combat Fighter

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I was wondering what are the quietest drives you can get now. I currently have 2x Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB for backup and a OCZ Vertex Series 120GB for my main OS.

I just wanted to know if there are quieter drives on the market now. I've noticed that there are these 'green' drives out now which spin slower. I was wondering how these compare to what I already have?

Thanks

:)
 
I've had F1s and my WD Ecogreen and Black edition drives are quieter (less resonance) and less audible when being accessed.

Even the WD Mybook external drive I have (1TB) is quiet -as expected i guess-.
 
Its really when the drives are idle you get that hum that I want to get rid of as I want my pc as quiet as possible.

So out of the Western Digital Caviar Green and the Samsung EcoGreen F2 which is the quietest?
 
I would say the same, my 1.5tb F2 is not exactl stonkingly fast, but not too slow either, very quiet though.

you've got to keep in mind that some drives will come with AAM enabled, some won't and some of your louder drives can be noticeably quietened down by enabling its AAM. If its only for storage the minor performance loss shouldn't be noticeable.

First step I'd take is enabling AAM on those F1's and see if you notice it getting quieter.

At the moment i've got 2x64gb crucials in raid, a 1.5TB drive as backup and a 640gb hitachi as a extra games/programs and downloading drive which seems fairly quiet. I might at some point as SSD's get cheaper have that 640GB replaced with a smaller SSD so I can leave the computer downloading with the only mechanical drive spun down while not being used so no noise overnight.
 
There are a couple of windows based things that can maybe enable it, but its difficult to use because generally only a couple sata ports these days work in plain ide mode properly, I forget the name of the one I tried, it could see my samsung drive, but not the hitachi or my seagate. The easiest method is to boot to dos with a usb stick and use the manufacturers own app from there. Samsung might be the only ones I haven't checked but Seagate and the rest have their own apps in the support section on their sites, I'm sure Samsung have something similar.

Sometimes you only get one option slowest/quietest and fastest/loudest but some give you graded performance so you can set the AAM level at several steps between quietest and loudest. Frankly for storage only I'd set it to the quiestest level possible.
 
Samsungs are usually v. quiet, seagates are a bit hit or miss - seems to depend batch to batch and model to model... i.e. I bought a whole load of 500gb 7200.12s a couple of months back and they are all as close to silent that you need to put your ear to the drive housing just to hear access ticks at all - even quieter than the samsungs... whereas I bought one more recently (different colored glue on the bottom I notice) and sometimes you can hear the access ticks from it (same AAM settings).
 
5400rpm laptop drive is likely to be quieter than the 5400rpm desktop drives, less mass being thrown around so less vibration.

I take it you've suspended the drives already?
 
Have a Samsung F2 1.5TB, quiet drive as standard, however I have switched the acoustic management on maxium setting - I did this as it's a data drive and it's handling mp3's/video's all day. Have to concentrate to hear drive, yet benchmark performance is still fine.
 
Any SSD will be super quiet. The next best thing would be one of those 5400 RPM "Eco" drives, lower spindle speed so it's a lot quieter. You'll take quite a performance hit with a 5400RPM drive though.
 
I have a 1tb wd green (32mb cache) and a 1tb samsung F2 ecogreen, the samsung is noticeably quieter, when touching the drives i can feel the WD vibrating but i can't even tell the samsung is spun up. The samsung also runs cooler and has better performance in hd tach.
 
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