looking for a quiet 7200 RPM ~500GB hard drive

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

Post Reply
Placid
Posts: 77
Joined: Sun Oct 14, 2007 4:32 pm
Location: US

looking for a quiet 7200 RPM ~500GB hard drive

Post by Placid » Fri Nov 16, 2012 2:38 pm

I am tired of the idle noise from my Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA hard drive. It's easily heard over the fans in my system. The idle noise is almost as loud as a Caviar Black 500GB.

In contrast, my Maxtor DaimondMax 200GB IDE and WD Caviar Blue 160GB IDE drives produces very little idle noise and vibration, that they do not need to be suspended; grommet mounting is enough. The idle noise is inaudible when they're inside the case.

So I'm looking for a quiet ~500GB SATA hard drive, give or take a little if there are no quiet 500's. I am less concerned with seek noise. It's the idle noise that will be heard most of the time. The obvious choice is the WD Green or AV-GP drives, but I would like to consider 7200 RPM candidates first. My primary choice would have been the Caviar Blue 640GB. This drive is known to be quiet as reviewed by SPCR, and the audio recordings of the WD's 640GB and 500GB was almost night and day. Unfortunately, the Blue 640GB is discontinued (any remaining stock is sold at outrageous prices). What other 7200 RPM hard drives within the ~500GB capacity range are as quiet as the ones mentioned?

Post Reply