Quiet HDD needed.

kmufc77 · 1 Jul 2010 at 22:40

Im about to get rid of my F3 Samsung as its annoying me with its constant on/off humming sound.

Ive done a test and disconnected each drive and the F3 is definitely the drive making all the noise

My other HDD is a 2TB Hitachi which is super silent and does not making a humming on/off sound.

Are the Western digital Green drives very quiet if not what other makes are quiet?

Im tempted to get another Hitachi which is the same model i have already just lower capacity.

Or i was thinking about getting a 2.5 VelociRaptor for another games drive as my SSD is not big enough for all my games and i have most of my games on my F3.

The 2.5 VelociRaptor must be quieter than the F3 as its much smaller?

cmndr_andi · 1 Jul 2010 at 23:08

If you are thinking of getting a velociraptor for low noise - you may want to look at this review.

The WD Green drives are indeed very quiet, as are the Samsung EcoGreen F2 drives. Both of these are pretty slow compared to a modern 7200RPM HDD, but are really quiet and cool - so are ideal for storage drives. I have to say, the F2 is a pretty awesome price for a lovely and quiet 1.5TB drive.

liquidex · 1 Jul 2010 at 23:10

Have you enabled acoustic management on the f3? Found it makes quite a bit of difference on mine.

In terms of quiet drives the Samsung F2 is the quietest I have heard even compared to my Western Digital Green.

snaggster · 1 Jul 2010 at 23:14

I have both an F3 and an F2... The F2 is by far much quiter though is only used as storage where as the F3 is my boot drive.
I would say get an F2 its silent and not a great deal slower than the F3.

Philtor · 2 Jul 2010 at 09:28

Can't go wrong with a Western Digital black. Reliable and nice and quiet

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-245-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=940

kmufc77 · 2 Jul 2010 at 14:18

well guys is seems its between the F2 samsung or the WD green drives?

I do not want another humming sound hard drive so im not sure which one to choose out of the 2 of these?

Admetos · 7 Jul 2010 at 12:27

I have a 1.5TB F2 Samsung with the acoustic management fully on, and it's pritty quite.

It's hard to put into words how quite somthng is on a forum, but I also have an old Maxtor (acoustic management not on) that must be 2-3 times the noise in terms of noticing it's in use. Go as far to say the Maxtor is intrusive, where as the Samsung is not.

Also the Samsung is quite a bit faster then the Maxtor, despite the Maxtor being a 2006 server grade drive, that was quite fast in it's day. I use an SSD for boot, but would have no worries booting from the Samsung if had to.

Final thing the Samsung gives of the least heat of any HDD I have had previous, looking now my Maxtor is showing 39c, where as the Samsung is showing a cool 29c.

EDIT. I just did a CrystalDiskMark bench on the F2, and got these. This is with compression switched on, and as mentioned acoustic management fully on.

Seq 90.63 (R) 87.25 (W)
512k 38.08 (R) 56.61 (W)
4k 0.579 (R) 1.228 (W)

AbsenceJam · 7 Jul 2010 at 12:58

JasonM said:
I have a 1.5TB F2 Samsung with the acoustic management fully on, and it's pritty quite.

It's hard to put into words how quite somthng is on a forum, but I also have an old Maxtor (acoustic management not on) that must be 2-3 times the noise in terms of noticing it's in use. Go as far to say the Maxtor is intrusive, where as the Samsung is not.

Also the Samsung is quite a bit faster then the Maxtor, despite the Maxtor being a 2006 server grade drive, that was quite fast in it's day. I use an SSD for boot, but would have no worries booting from the Samsung if had to.

Final thing the Samsung gives of the least heat of any HDD I have had previous, looking now my Maxtor is showing 39c, where as the Samsung is showing a cool 29c.

EDIT. I just did a CrystalDiskMark bench on the F2, and got these. This is with compression switched on, and as mentioned acoustic management fully on.

Seq 90.63 (R) 87.25 (W)
512k 38.08 (R) 56.61 (W)
4k 0.579 (R) 1.228 (W)

Why would you use compression? Surely you're saving almost no space.

Admetos · 7 Jul 2010 at 15:29

AbsenceJam said:
Why would you use compression? Surely you're saving almost no space.

For media files that the case, however exe's compress down to 60-70% of their size, text based files compress as low as 5-10%. It's very useful to enable on software development folders that are almost all text/exe based, it can also speed up the disk access on these, see later.

I've just checked what i'm saving on my Program Files (x86).
Size 21.2GB - Size on disk - 14.4GB.

This is space on saving on some archived Visual Studio dev folders
Size 90.9GB - Size on disk - 58.0GB

This is my mp3 folder - here I agree compression should not be used.
Size 290GB - Size on disk - 285GB

I run compression on all drives, and have done for many years and never felt my data was less reliable.

It also puts less load on the physical HDD/SSD as your writing/reading less data. In terms of performance compression can boost performance and was used for TurboLoading on Commodore 64 / Amiga. That was in the days of tape / floppy - but like wise my i5 750 is many times faster then a 6502 / 68000.

Compression will make writing media files, or files that are already compressed slower.

I also run compression on memory sticks, by first re-formatting them to NTFS. The sticks even work on latest Mac OS and read/write the compressed volume as Windows would. Memory sticks are very slow, so there is significant performance gains when saving text based files such as office documents.

SoildSnake · 12 Jul 2010 at 21:57

Sorry to jack this thread but is it okay to leave this drive on all the time? at first i was going to have it for just video; and let it turn off or hibernate when not watching anything but now i want to use as an entire documents disk; as in pictures music, video, files etc. I will also want to be downlaoding/uplading from this drive; would this affect the drive; i heard these or something close are desinged for non-constant use? And would the turn/off feature affect peer to peer software?

Thanks

AbsenceJam · 12 Jul 2010 at 22:09

SoildSnake said:
Sorry to jack this thread but is it okay to leave this drive on all the time? at first i was going to have it for just video; and let it turn off or hibernate when not watching anything but now i want to use as an entire documents disk; as in pictures music, video, files etc. I will also want to be downlaoding/uplading from this drive; would this affect the drive; i heard these or something close are desinged for non-constant use? And would the turn/off feature affect peer to peer software?

Thanks

You can run any drive 24/7.

Atom · 13 Jul 2010 at 01:14

Same problems I had with my F1 drives. Ended up binning them. For storage I am using 2 WD Greens, 32mb cache one and a 64mb cache one also a Seagate LP drive and I never hear a peep out of any of them. The Seagate is slightly faster at 90mbs compared to roughly 78mbs on the Greens. Also ran a Black and that was quiet except for the seeks.