Going from WD Black to Red/Blue to reduce noise.

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Im replacing two WD black drives in my pc as the noise is too much from an otherwise silent pc. Im getting a 1TB SSD to replace one and then a quieter 3TB hard drive to replace the second drive.

Ive looked at the specs on western digitals website and the red drives are the most quiet at around 23db for both idle and write, the Black drive being around 29 and 36db.

So my question is has anyone went from a WD Black drive to a Blue or Red and if so how much real world difference is there is noise level?
 
Soldato
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5400rpm drives have automatic starting position advantage to rotational noise.
Lower speed means lower rotational energy and also frequency of sound is lower.
For any two particular samples there can be of course some variation.

Also seek noise should be less agressive.
 
Soldato
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Reds are designed for NAS but going from a Black to Blue should give you a drop in noise levels, I know Blacks can be quite noise at full tilt.
 
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So ive got a 1tb samsung ssd and have decided to wait and hope the 2TB drives drop down more. I figured theres no point in getting a hard drive thats only gonna be temporary until ssd drives are cheaper. I feel red and blue would both be a big drop in noise. Those black drives are bonkers. They cost me a small fortune at the time too :(
 
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Nothing beats complete silence.

Indeed. I run all SSDs now for both programs and storage and no mechanical drives any more, system is lovely and quiet, can barely hear it. Just got a USB SATA enclosure for my mechanical drives, which are used as backups for some of the SSD data and are offline and not spinning 99% of the time. The remainder of the SSD data is around 40 games, I'm just lazy when it comes to swapping them around due to space, although I've run out of SATA ports now :p
 
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So my question is has anyone went from a WD Black drive to a Blue or Red and if so how much real world difference is there is noise level?

I had a 2TB Black that was really noisy and annoyed me, I got another 2TB Black and that was exactly the same.
I came to accept that the noise was a feature, not a fault, but it still annoyed me so I looked around for a replacement.
I considered a WD Blue and a WD Red, but decided on the WD Red on the basis that if I wasn't happy with it, I could use it in a NAS.
So I bought the WD Red, have used it as a desktop drive every day for six months and it is whisper quiet - I'm really pleased.

One thing that concerned me before I bought it was that the WD Red has TLER set on 7 seconds, and many people will tell you that TLER means you shouldn't use it as a desktop drive.
Well, the WD Black 1TB models had TLER disabled (what I expected), but the WD Black 2TB models had TLER set on 7 seconds (exactly the same as a WD Red) so I figured the Red wouldn't be any worse than the WD Black 2TB I was using.
 
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