Quietest 250GB drive?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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BoB-O
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Quietest 250GB drive?

Post by BoB-O » Mon Jul 11, 2005 8:29 am

Hey all,

I'm going to put together a RAID5 array in a quiet (not silent) workstation. It looks like the best bang/buck is at 250GB. I'm going to use 4 SATA drives (coming from a system with a 15k SCSI drive) and am wondering which is going to be the best wrt noise. From the reviews, it looks like the Maxtor MLIII is the best overall, but I hear people praising the Hitachi drives.

Well folks, opinions?

Thanks,
BoB

NeilBlanchard
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Post by NeilBlanchard » Mon Jul 11, 2005 8:58 am

Hello Bob & welcome,

Have you checked out the recommended drives section? I'm betting that the Samsung are going to be the quietest, based on my experience with other drives -- I have not used the new larger Samsungs, though.

teknerd
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Post by teknerd » Mon Jul 11, 2005 9:04 am

I have one of the new WD SATA drives (with FDB) and would highly recommend that. It is very quiet (basically inaudible in my system). Considering that you are shooting for a quiet and not silent system, they should work great. (I'm also about to pick up 4 of the 250's for my campus tv station becaues of the bang for the buck. monarchcomputer.com has the 250's for $110.)

BoB-O
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Post by BoB-O » Mon Jul 11, 2005 9:15 am

NeilBlanchard wrote:Hello Bob & welcome,

Have you checked out the recommended drives section? I'm betting that the Samsung are going to be the quietest, based on my experience with other drives -- I have not used the new larger Samsungs, though.
Yeah, I looked there. I couldn't find any of the Sammy 250GBs at any US resellers. Any pointers?

Thanks,
BoB

BoB-O
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Post by BoB-O » Mon Jul 11, 2005 9:16 am

teknerd wrote:I have one of the new WD SATA drives (with FDB) and would highly recommend that. It is very quiet (basically inaudible in my system). Considering that you are shooting for a quiet and not silent system, they should work great. (I'm also about to pick up 4 of the 250's for my campus tv station becaues of the bang for the buck. monarchcomputer.com has the 250's for $110.)
I'm a little biased. The whole reason I want to do RAID5 is my POS WD drives that keep failing and taking my data down with them. To WDs credit, the RMA has always been smooth, but they refuse to admit there's a greater problem. For that reason, I don't know if I can support them.

Thanks,
BoB

teknerd
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Post by teknerd » Mon Jul 11, 2005 3:27 pm

Bob-O wrote:I'm a little biased. The whole reason I want to do RAID5 is my POS WD drives that keep failing and taking my data down with them. To WDs credit, the RMA has always been smooth, but they refuse to admit there's a greater problem. For that reason, I don't know if I can support them.
My system is now entirely WD drives (a 40GB, a 74GB Raptor, and a 320GB SATA JD-series) and i havent had a problem, course i understand your bias, im the same way with several companies. I'd still recommend the WD but if you really dont want to go with them then the maxtor diamondback 10's would probably be your best bet.

BenW
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Post by BenW » Tue Jul 12, 2005 3:08 am

From what i've read on here, the new samsung 250GBs are possibly the quietest drives you can buy

perplex
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Post by perplex » Tue Jul 12, 2005 3:29 am

BenW wrote:From what i've read on here, the new samsung 250GBs are possibly the quietest drives you can buy
i've read people people's impressions saying P80 is quieter than P120. have to wait for SPCR's review though 8)

BoB-O
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Post by BoB-O » Tue Jul 12, 2005 8:16 am

BenW wrote:From what i've read on here, the new samsung 250GBs are possibly the quietest drives you can buy
If you could only buy them in the USA. :(

I have a mail out to endpcnoise.com to see if they can get them.

BoB

JazzJackRabbit
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Post by JazzJackRabbit » Tue Jul 12, 2005 9:57 am

BoB-O wrote:
BenW wrote:From what i've read on here, the new samsung 250GBs are possibly the quietest drives you can buy
If you could only buy them in the USA. :(

I have a mail out to endpcnoise.com to see if they can get them.

BoB
Monarch had them in stock a week ago, but they seem to be out ATM. You could try checking their website every so often, or maybe give them a call.

http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant ... HardDrives

Or you could settle for 200Gb. Both newegg and ZZF carry those for a very reasonable price.

I would also not recommend WD, although for different reasons. All our WDs have been very reliable, not a single failure in over ~8 drives, however my recent 3200JD has a very audible whine.

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=23109

I'm not the originator, but I also posted there several times. There are also couple of other threads here in silent storage forum about the same problem if you search back.

james22
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Post by james22 » Fri Jul 15, 2005 8:35 pm

Without a question, the Maxtor DM10. I have two 300GB and one 250GB and (without resorting to anal measurement techniques) they all run just as silently as my Samsung 160GB NIDEC, one of the benchmarks for silent drives. They are very fast too.

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