DISCLAIMER: This is by no means a professional quality review. Every following bit of information is based on my own experience with said product for 5 hours. Rather than a review call it "first impressions" if you like. Nothing should be taken seriously here and all information is provided as is. ...

If black is your thing check out the Nexus Frizzbee. As a small note the Molex on the coolers can be used to passthrough power to minimize cables (as in HDD + cooler only single Molex) but you can just wire up the fan with a single Molex and the HDD with its own power cable.

I agree it would be great but then again who is going to pay for all the samples? Meanwhile the best would be to check out Tom's Hardware 2.5 inch HDD charts and see how good each of these 2.5 inch drives perform. The problem with Tom's Hardware and Storage Review and many others is that they do not...

What about the Scorpio Blue? I could pick up the 160GB version anytime. Many say it is very quiet and I am sure it is thanks to 5400RPM speed and not WD's "WhisperDrive". I made lots of research and it seems that compared to the Scorpio Black, the Blue is just a very tiny slight bit slower that it s...

Was the Hitachi a 5400RPM drive?

I am very lost here... Is the difference between 5400RPM and 7200RPM *that* big? Target use is watching DVDs and anime as well as the occasional gaming session and last but not least listening and recording as well as production of music.

Just a small notice: the Seagate firmware problems were mostly affected by HDDs produced in Thailand. According to my research mostly it's OEM offerings through which a user can get a potentially faulty HDD.

Thanks for the input. I heard the Scorpio Black supports AAM. Have you tried setting it with various AAM values to see how its noise level and performance changes? I read at the WD website that it is only 22 dBA idle (average)... Anyone else had experience with Scorpio Black HDDs?

I am looking forward to buying a notebook HDD to help my aim in building a truly quiet desktop. Right now for me silence > performance. However, performance should be comparable to desktop HDDs and not slow. Also I can and will not suspend my HDD... this leaves me with the only option of buying a no...

>> No eSATA connection on the front panel. Maybe it's more useful than FireWire, but I bet that the minority of camcorder users who use FireWire regularly is larger than the minority who swap external eSATA HDDs often. Most motherboards have eSATA onboard and if not simply get a SATA -> eSATA adapte...

Good to see Seagate is doing stuff in the right direction. First they finally fix faulty drives and now make their 1.5TB Barracuda better. The revolution has begun!

It's up to you makes me feel uneasy in case I make the wrong decision :( Regarding heat it won't be a big problem... I mean, graphics cards can operate at 100C too so having a few more degrees isn't going to make the system more problematic. Let's take the situation from a gamer's point-of-view. Whi...

I have the chance of trading my sound card in for either one of these cards (both Club 3D branded and will have a ZALMAN VF-900 Cu installed). Target system will be an HTPC for DVD viewing (sound card to be traded offers 24-bit analog audio but I finally got a second Dolby Digital decoder so the HTP...

EDIT: Forum had some problems with the poll... Don't mind it. I have already gotten confirmation from a fellow SPCR user that hdparm -t /dev/sd[a-z] will report the buffered disk read at around 50MB/s speed with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 HDD. 100MB/s is expected and can be achieved when changing t...

I have experimented with ZALMAN fans, especially ZM-F3 models. Trust me, with the included adapter they are very audible, but getting them down to 5V they are not that audible, but still produce a bit noise... Given your PSU and other components your PC will be very noisy anyway so there is no hope ...

Not taking any weighting filters into account, remember that 3dB is the magical number. In Fletcher-Munson type compensation, 10dB is translated to twice the original loudness in the human brain. However, doubling of intensity always causes an increase of approximately 3dB in decibel's logarithmic s...

Yes but look on the bright side: now to get as much as 500GB of storage space, you can get a single-platter drive which means less noise whatsoever. I guess most of us aren't looking towards 2TB yet. I mean, 1TB and 1.5TB is a hella lot of storage space anyway even for a home media server (unless yo...

¤&*! *%&##*! !¤*%&*#*¤!?!?! Of course once I buy a new HDD the company must come up with a new version! Nah just kidding! I'm excited to see when these new Barracudas come to the stores and of course when there are some benchmarks available

You mean by using the top fan as an intake instead of an exhaust you have lower CPU temps? I must try this too!

The Zalman 7000alcu has a $5 adapter for using it on socket 775. In case you didn't know, ZALMAN is producing a new variant of the CNPS-7000 dubbed CNPS-7000 C . It comes with the good old plastic mounting kit ZALMAN is known for. I ordered the new variant and also the ZM-CS1 clip support you talke...

I've never understood what's so cool in a big heat sink like the Scythe Ninja. Notice "cool" and not "good-for-an-undervolted-fan-making-it-silent-and-effective-with-an-undervolted-CPU". They just take too much space to work with I say (had my own experience with an ULTRA CPU cooler which name I can...

Mike, great article! In the beginning there was a notice of the ZALMAN CNPS-7000... I would have loved it if you made a quick summary about how new ZALMAN designs are better/worse than it and if the 7000 can be still considered unique today. I have one and I've not had the need to replace the fan, b...

Whoa whiic that's a fairly big attack, let me start a defensing move, ok? 1) My Cheetah is now in an environment for which it was intended. A synthesizer works internally like a small file server when it comes to HDD I/O. So the Cheetah is now happily there to serve my synthesizer new samples and ye...

Quite mysterious, because the person I spoke with also had a Seagate and then bought a new Barracuda ES.2 (??)

Whatever it is, it must have something to do with the Seagate algorithms, but I was very sure it was the cache

Heh you posted before I made the edit. So read the above post again please
P.S. and you are qualified to say if audio software is bad? By what standards
EDIT: In audio terms sampling is the same as streaming. Just to clear up confusion

@QuietOC: Do you have GigaSampler or GigaStudio to prove you are right? Again streaming not the same as direct streaming in digital recording terms. EDIT: To clear it up, direct streaming and the algorithms that at least Nemesys GigaSampler uses (must be better with TASCAM GigaStudio) are random. Us...

(Sorry for bad managing of posts) @whiic: You said I have only experience with older HDDs and that knowing better will make me sad. You know, I am talking about things in my particular setup here, but I have set up a NAS with my father that is used as a remote storage center; all PCs here are connec...

In reply to whiic and the comment on my Cheetah: DO NOT, I repeat NOT say bad things about my Seagate Cheetah. I paid a premium for it and it is actually still in use. I have it equipped to my synthesizer, it's a ST373207LW aka Cheetah 10K.7 one of the NEWEST SCSI HDDs with a Fluid Dynamic Bearing m...

(In reply to lm's post) Didn't bother trying AHCI mode before, but now that you say it... I got to the BIOS, set SATA mode to AHCI (no RAID) instead of IDE emulation. Went through the quick Lenny installer again, and here are hdparm results: h4x:~# hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk r...

I think some of you might like to have the option to track me down and shoot at me with homing missiles, but hey this Seagate is a great HDD and I am sorry that I didn't join the Western Digital WD6400AAKS club! So a little about my particular Barracuda. It's a 500GB version and yes the small jumper...

Sorry for going a bit off-topic, but wait a second Kate... Woman + Energetic + Optimistic + PC tinkerer + Final Fantasy fan + NOT shooting-game person + Globally thinking + Trance lover = Angel? Honestly you are a person I have never ever met. We're the same! I don't like shooting games either, and ...