Rattling Raptor - are they meant to be this LOUD?

TheBigCheese · 30 Dec 2006 at 18:00

Rattling Raptor - Update with screenshots

Hi folks

I had a 150Gb Raptor X delivered from OCUK a couple of days back and as I'm typing I'm putting it to good use recoding and compressing a video from one area of the disk to another.

It doesn't seem all that quick at doing it...it's recoding at about 10,000Kb/s which isn't all that fast - I've had 12K-15K on my standard WD 320Gb SATA drives.

It's also very loud - really annoyingly loud, it's making the standard HDD stratchy noise, but just magnified...are they supposed to be this loud or is it just mine???

daveydave · 30 Dec 2006 at 21:37

RMA me thinks

TheBigCheese · 31 Dec 2006 at 13:35

I've done some drive benchmarking today and it has come up with what I think is a weird result.

The drive speed is consistantly high - and quiet until it starts doing the ramdom access test when it gets really loud...when I get the results this is the graph:

Quick Benchmark

Long Benchmark

As you can see there is a significant dip in performance around the 100Gb mark....I've run a scandisk using the Windows utility with fix bad sectors option selected but it didn't report finding anything.

Any thoughts or advice would be welcomed at this point - do they do this or do I have a duff drive? I want to be sure before returning it.

Thanks

TheBigCheese · 1 Jan 2007 at 19:30

Update added

squiffy · 1 Jan 2007 at 19:35

Random access will always be loud, the heads are moving back and forth randomly. I don't have a raptor, but with it out of the case from what distance can you hear it spinning/accessing?

This is the test from my 7200RPM Western Digital 3200KS. Mine has lower CPU % and higher burst, but yours has higher constant which makes sense.

Rroff · 1 Jan 2007 at 20:03

Those speeds seem about right, and raptors aren't quiet... the reason I went for seagate drives in RAID0, they give very good performance, are fairly quiet and reasonable cool... all the raptor rigs I've seen have given a little better performance but at the cost of a LOT more noise and quite a bit more heat...

thefishdude · 1 Jan 2007 at 20:19

i got 2 raptors but they are fixed in my p180 wiith rubber mountings and i cant hear them at all. only time i hear them is when i power down they sound cool then

Justintime · 1 Jan 2007 at 20:31

Yea i gotta say, using rubber mounts really make a difference with my SCSI and Raptor drives, from 5.25 kits to my P180 it really makes drives shut up

Trox · 1 Jan 2007 at 21:44

squiffy said:
Random access will always be loud, the heads are moving back and forth randomly. I don't have a raptor, but with it out of the case from what distance can you hear it spinning/accessing?

This is the test from my 7200RPM Western Digital 3200KS. Mine has lower CPU % and higher burst, but yours has higher constant which makes sense.

Also to note yir access time is a lot higher than the raptor, which makes it phwn it

ajgoodfellow · 2 Jan 2007 at 00:58

As said above, Raptor drives are noisy on seek

I've got one mounted on Rubber grommets and it's quiet on idle but you can hear it rumbling away on seek - I cannot hear my Seagate drive at all

This is an old HDTach result when I was running it on my old ASUS A8V Socket 940 motherboard using the Promise controller on XP x64. It's only connected via SATA150 hence the low burst speed

I've since upgraded to an AM2 system