Noisy external drives?

Scottland

Scottland

Scottland

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
15,723
Location
North Wales
Hi,


I'm interested in an external drive (3.5" size), a fried of mine has a WD Elements one - but it's really noisy. I appreciate there will be some noise from the drive spinning, but this was noisier than my PC and Laptop combined. It sounded like it had a fan, but I couldn't see one inside.


Are they all like this, or are some better? I could go internal if they're all a bit noisy...
 
3tb, speed isn't an issue as it's just going to be a redundant copy of video/media files. I know I could add a 2nd WD Red to my machine and it wouldn't increase noise much - but I liked the idea of having it external.
 
They aren't normally that loud, and drive in them are going to be the same sort of drives you'll get as internal ones.

If you Google a particular model you can probably fine out what HDD is inside.

One thing to watch out is some drives have built in encryption within the interface, this can be active even when you haven't set up any encryption yourself.

This can be a problem if the USB interface fails as you won't be able to just take the HDD out and plug it into your PC sata port as the data will be encrypted. I had this problem with the Western Digital My Book.
Luckily it was only a backup drive so no data lost and the HDD was useable after formatting.

I can say the Seagate Expansion series (2-3TB) are pretty quiet, got a few at work.
 
There's a few mentions around the internet that the WD does have some sort of fan inside, that might explain the noise as it did sound fan-like. The seagate looks like a sealed unit so assume there will be no fans, the hum of a drive is fine - but noisy little 40mm fans...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom