Quiet SATA Drives - Samsung vs Seagate

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 10:50

Im currently in the market for a new Hard drive - around 250GB (limited by budget as im getting 2 for RAID0)

For me quietness is important as the machine is always on downloading something or doing something in the background.

I think Ive cut the list down to 4:

Samsung T-Series HD300LJ
Samsung SpinPoint P120 Series 250GB
Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10
Seagate's Barracuda 7200.9

Reading the reviews, the Samsung T seems to be quietest but Im looking for personal opinion if you have these drives etc

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 11:12

just gonna have the raid0

The slower drives shouldnt make much odds if theyre raided anyway - cos it will be quicker than it is now

You can still partition raid0 right?

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 11:43

Yeah is the writing and gaming performance which im bothered about

and the 250s are perpendicular ones too

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 11:53

Just been doing some research (Drive Name - Idle Bels - Access Bels) :

Current Drive: 2.7 3.7
300LJ: 2.7 2.9
7200.10: 2.7 3.0
7200.9: 2.7 3.2
Samsung T: 2.5 2.8

Samsung T is queitest on paper....

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 12:10

The figures were really to prove that anything i get is queiter than now

I can hear the reads now - especially at night (i live in the country little ambient noise)

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 12:33

smids said:
I too live in the country (Kent countryside ). At night it is completely dead quiet.

Honestly, the Seagates are faster, use new technology, are quiet and reliable. I cannot see sense in buying a Samsung. I own a Seagate 320GB 7200.10 and it is very quiet.

Do you have the Seagate in the same room as you at night?

Can you hear it?

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 13:13

tbh if the performance is slightly lower then im not bothered - sound is number 1

Copy and pasted from a review:

The noise measurements place the Spinpoint T slightly better than either the Western Digital or Samsung's previous drives and roughly on par with the classic Barracuda IV. As usual, the measurements do give a rough idea of where the drive stands but don't tell the whole story.

At idle, the Spinpoint sounded very clean and smooth. The Samsung Drives and the Western Digital were all very similar in volume, and all exhibited the same whoosh of airflow. Subjectively, the Spinpoint T sounded the nicest by a small margin; it sounded softer than the Western Digital, and had less high frequency noise than the older Samsung drives. It should be emphasized that the drives all sounded very similar, and any would be acceptable in quiet system.

Our usual recommendation to soft-mount any desktop drive goes double for the Spinpoint T: Its vibration level was very high, and a low 120 Hz hum could sometimes be heard even when the drive was placed on foam. When placed on a hard surface, the hum was amplified and came to dominate the noise character, confirming that hard-mounting would not be good for noise quality.

We were pleased to note that seek noise was much improved over the P120 — something that is not reflected in the noise measurements. Seeks were duller and more muted than the P120, although not quite as good as the P80, and certainly not as good as the nigh inaudible Western Digital. Even better, AAM seemed to be working again, and did much to reduce the sharpness of the seek noise. This is good news; seek noise was one of the biggest disappointments with the P120.

The extra platter in the T Series did not increase power consumption, which was in line with other 3.5" drives, and even a little on the low side for such a large drive. Power consumption was almost identical to the P120.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Idle 24 dBA@1m 28-34 dBA@1m
Samsung Spinpoint T Idle 20 dBA@1m Seek 22-23 dBA@1m

As you can see theres a big difference in seek volumes there....

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 13:21

wizardmaxx said:
Why not go for the gigabyte i-ram if silence is number1. only kidding, but some of the benchies are impressive. Cant wait for the sata II version to come out

I actuially saw that yesterday but its 4gig max per card right?

and you mean the sata II version of that card?

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 13:32

wizardmaxx said:
As far as i know its 8gb per card and it has a sata 1 controller on it thus its burst speed copying is lower than any sata II hdd, whereas the new sata ii version will be able to compete it that arena again, but with seek times in the milliseconds......mmmmmm.

Yeah just re read the article though - 16 hours charge time

So if you get a power cut (read further up where i live in the country), you lose all your data

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 13:43

wizardmaxx said:
Why not just get one of these

http://www.genpropower.com/powerware_931511.htm

Should tide you over for a few days until power comes back on

Maybe a little bit overkill just for a harddrive - and were way OT!

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 14:37

I already have an enclosure but i can still hear the drive

THT · 19 Sep 2006 at 14:58

From a Review:

Note that the burst transfer rate of the 7200.10 is substantially lower than that of the other drives. The maximum burst transfer rate of SATA 3Gbps is about 300 megabytes per second, so we're not really saturating the interface; the older Seagate 7200.9 and the Maxtor DiamondMax drives come closer, at roughly 240 megabytes per second. We're not yet sure if the behavior is simply a firmware tuning issue, or something fundamental to the new perpendicular recording technology.

The burst transfer rate didn't seem to have much impact on the average sustained throughput. Here, the new 7200.10 is clearly faster than both of the older drives in sustained read and write performance. Random access time is clearly better, too.

If we look at the RAID 0 results, the random access number decreases slightly—no surprise. The transfer rate also increases substantially.

THT · 20 Sep 2006 at 16:30

We were talking about the I-Ram

Now check this:

TDK has followed Samsung and launched a hard drive replacement based on NAND Flash memory. The product, which is currently available in sample quantities, was announced by the company last week.

The 32GB unit hooks up to the host across a standard IDE connector, but it's about 80 per cent of the size of a standard 2.5in notebook drive - the part's an obvious choice for battery powered systems since it consumes less power than a standard HDD. The unit's controller supports data transfer rates of up to 33.3MBps, the manufacturer said.