2TB Western Digital 3.5-inch (WD20EADS) is QUIET?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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aztec
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Post by aztec » Tue Feb 10, 2009 11:46 pm

1 more from TR:

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16393

This drive seems to be a winner.

__Miguel_
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Post by __Miguel_ » Wed Feb 11, 2009 2:21 am

Nice finding, aztec.

Now, the question MUST be asked: why do review sites use the same benchmarks for both performance-oriented and storage-oriented drives?

It's like comparing the Concorde with the A380 (or just about any other long-haul commercial aircraft), and saying "Heh, it packs a lot of people in it, but it's SLOOOW". I mean, these drives are NOT meant to be system drives, only bulk storage. So, comparing them with just about anything that spins at 7200rpm or above is ridiculous...

But enough of that. There was one thing that caught my attention: the 50% areal density increase over the EADS series, which translated to a measly 4% increase in throughput (as opposed to 33% and 30%, respectively, from the EACS to EADS). Since spindle speeds, according to WD, only vary about 5% between different models, I beg to ask: is WD having trouble getting data to flow faster from platter to the host? Or it can go faster, but that would make this drive too power-hungry (or too fast to be a GP... :lol:)

If WD is only keeping it "just fast enough", I imagine what the Black series 500GB and 1TB (500GB/platter) will be... Damn...

Cheers.

Miguel

tutu
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Post by tutu » Thu Feb 12, 2009 5:27 am

Here are some actual noise graphs!!!

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16393/11

Still have to wait till end of Feb to get one in the UK. Hopefully they fixed the problem mentioned in the sticky tho

Nil Einne
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Post by Nil Einne » Sun Feb 15, 2009 9:40 am

whiic wrote:Sidrack Marinbo would probably qualify as a fanboy or hired propagandist: Seagate failures -> failures caused by high capacity alone and present in all manufacturers flagships. I'm pretty sure that if 1TB Hitachis were falling the same way as Seagates do, SidMar (and thousands of other Seagate-fanboys) all around the world would cry "Deathstar" without a second of hesitation.

I hope Seagate reputation would get a hit from this 7200.11 issue. While some data will be lost in the process (though Seagate has promised firmware updates for drives not yet dead, and free data recovery for drives already dead), it would make most Seagate-fanboys to accept the reality that no brand can be always superior to others and that Seagate is no exception. Seagate has not been superior with the 7200.10 or 7200.9 either... people just assume they were.

Bursting the Seagate reliability bubble which is fed by closed-loop feedback within Seagate fandom and the 5-year-warranty (which Seagate has given up for consumer grade drives!) is definitely a good thing. Getting rid of the superiority illusion will give other manufacturers a good chance at competing the supergiant of HDD manufacturers. And with the good products from all the competitors have made recently, they actually deserve their chance to get some more customers. Monopoly and guaranteed sales aren't good motivators for evolving so even Seagate customers would likely benefit from the issues on a longer time period (just skipping the 7200.11 until issues have been solved with certainty).

But, due to Seagate-fanboyism, these issues will most likely be swept under the rug. This 7200.11 will not be enough to make the bubble to break, unfortunately. But that's just my prediction of what's going to happen / not going to happen. This issue falls quite a bit short from Deathstar disaster... the biggest difference being that IBM never admitted the disaster while Seagate eventually did (after a period of censorship and denial).
I would have to disagree with you here. I don't think there is any 'Seagate reliability bubble'. I've never heard of such a thing nor seen any evidence for one (beyond as exists for all manufacturers). One of the reasons why Seagate is popular in the retail market is because of the 5 year warranty. Not because it means their drives are going to last longer simply that everything else being equal, for many people a 2 year extra warranty is a big difference. Here in NZ and also in Malaysia, the price difference has varied depending on drive and other stuff but the Seagate drives have usually been on the low end of the scale. Seagate also had an excellent online warranty procedure in NZ and Malaysia (along with Hitachi IIRC) which WD lacked (for a long while it wasn't available for the Asia Pacific region) and Samsung still lacks (other then for India).

When it comes down it what else is there? Performance is a more tricky issue. However the trouble with HDD performance is it depends so much on your app. I used to care about performance, however I was greatly disillusioned when StorageReview updated their benchmark suite and there was such a drastic change in how each drive ranked. I realised then what I should have realised long ago. With something like HDDs, performance is so variable depending on precisely what the HDD is being made to do that you have to take great care in generalising performance differences. If you know precisely what you're going to be doing then you can benchmark it but if not, you should IMHO take performance with a grain of salt. And this was with SR who actually do decent performance reviews unlike 99% of sites out there who have no idea what they were doing (SPR of course is another odd exception).

For many, particularly here, noise is a big concern and Seagate haven't generally done that well there in the past. For me though, I admit it's not the biggest concern at least when you're not talking about extreme difference. (For me, unless your talking about some old noisy POS the HDD noise is usually barely audible above other components). And let's face it, there are a lot of people who care even less then me.

Relaibility is a big concern, but the trouble is it's impossible to get anything close to meaningful figures for the ordinary public. Yes there are issues which crop up like the Seagate firmware issue or the WD Green Power issue with Linux. But all drives die. Some drives die more then others but we have no way of knowing which ones they are. Anecdotal reports are useless. There are just as many people claiming that all their Seagate, Hitachi, Samsung, or WD drives died as there are claiming that none of them died. In other words, unless there's a major issue, there's no point worrying about reliability since you'd never know which drive is actually better then the other. Just backup like you should and hope for the best.

So really, warranty and price are two of the biggest concern with worrying about and as I've already mentioned, Seagate have been excellent on both in general. IMHO that is the biggest reason for Seagates success in the retail market (if they have been the most successful in the retail market, which I'm not convinced, I've never really seen any figures showing Seagate dominating in the retail market).

Things may change now that Seagate gave up on the 5 year warranty. I myself am now looking at the alternatives. In some ways, it's interesting, it's been a while since I've really looked much into each manufacturer. (Of course let's remember the other manufacturers could have made me look at them before now. Indeed if any one of them chooses to do a Seagate and start 5 years from now on they'd have another loyal customer in me and a few others I know). Although admitedly since I'm putting together a HTPC for someone, I'm also looking at noise something as I said above I haven't looked that closely at before.

However let's face it, the retail market has little to do with Seagate's success. It's been the OEM market which is many orders of magnitude larger and more important. That has nothing to do with reliability bubbles. If Dell or HP or whoever buy Seagate HDDs more then others it's not because Michael Dell thinks Seagate HDDs are more reliable because he heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who read it on usenet. Large OEMs have meaningful figures. However I'm not saying Seagate's success in the OEM market has to do with better reliability. The truth is, I don't know what it is, I suspect it has more to do with price, good warranty procedures with the OEMs, economies of scale and perhaps simple inertia and/or abuse of their monopoly.

P.S. In case I didn't make it clear, I'm not saying there aren't Seagate fanboys. There are Seagate fanboys just as there are Samsung, Hitachi, and WD fanboys AND haters. All are equally stupid and I've not seen any evidence there are more Seagate ones then others. If anything I've seen more evidence of Seagate haters then Seagate fanboys.

xol
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Post by xol » Fri Apr 17, 2009 4:58 am

Hey all,

How is the market for the 2tb hard drive moving? Is it possible to get an okay 2tb hard drive at a lower price by now?

-xol

__Miguel_
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Post by __Miguel_ » Sat Apr 18, 2009 9:05 am

Not really. At least in Portugal.

Right now the WD20EADS is about €300, while the WD10EADS sells for around €95~€100, and 1.5TB drives (including the VERY elusive WD15EADS) are about €150 a pop.

So I'd say, no. Price probably won't come down until Samsung and/or Seagate release 2TB models. And even then, only if the options have much better performance or a substantially lower power draw, otherwise the 2TB GP will have the "I'm the best one for the job" markup.

Cheers.

Miguel

Avalanche
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Post by Avalanche » Tue Apr 21, 2009 11:10 am

Of course we'll get real data once MikeC gets his hands on these drives, but I found this chart from Tom's HD Roundup article quite confounding:

Image

How can the adding one platter make the WD Caviar Green 2 *that* much louder? How can the 7200 RPM Segate v12 be the quietest? Why is the 7200.12 1000 GB quieter than the 750 GB which is quieter than the 500 GB? I'm so confused...

dhanson865
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Post by dhanson865 » Tue Apr 21, 2009 6:40 pm

Avalanche wrote:Of course we'll get real data once MikeC gets his hands on these drives, but I found this chart from Tom's HD Roundup article quite confounding:

Image

How can the adding one platter make the WD Caviar Green 2 *that* much louder? How can the 7200 RPM Segate v12 be the quietest? Why is the 7200.12 1000 GB quieter than the 750 GB which is quieter than the 500 GB? I'm so confused...
1. read /viewtopic.php?p=404570

2. read at least the first 2 or 3 pages of http://www.silentpcreview.com/article242-page1.html if you read page 3 just stop when you get done with vibration. Power doesn't matter for this discussion.

If after reading that thread and 2.5 pages of that article you still don't see obvious problems with the table you quoted then ask more questions.

__Miguel_
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Post by __Miguel_ » Wed Apr 22, 2009 5:20 am

dhanson865 wrote:If after reading that thread and 2.5 pages of that article you still don't see obvious problems with the table you quoted then ask more questions.
+1 for further explanation, please. And sorry for the blunt D&D reference... :P

I've read those links, but I'm not very literate in regards to the math involved around sound.

I do know, however, that high sound pressure values (dBA, I believe, right?) don't necessarily correlate to an obnoxious appliance. You might have high values in non-ear-critical frequency ranges. Am I right, or the lack of sleep over the last two weeks is finally taking its toll on me?

Cheers.

Miguel

dhanson865
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Post by dhanson865 » Wed Apr 22, 2009 8:37 am

__Miguel_ wrote:
dhanson865 wrote:If after reading that thread and 2.5 pages of that article you still don't see obvious problems with the table you quoted then ask more questions.
+1 for further explanation, please. And sorry for the blunt D&D reference... :P

I've read those links, but I'm not very literate in regards to the math involved around sound.

I do know, however, that high sound pressure values (dBA, I believe, right?) don't necessarily correlate to an obnoxious appliance. You might have high values in non-ear-critical frequency ranges. Am I right, or the lack of sleep over the last two weeks is finally taking its toll on me?

Cheers.

Miguel
Cheap sound meters mean measuring much closer to the source or else the noise won't register at all on the meter. Measuring close means you will have more issues with directionality of the sound meaning more variation from reviewer to reviewer and from product to product.

I could go on and on (oh wait, I did go on and on) I hope that those comments make it obvious to you that you just can't take the higher dba results seriously once you see something like this:

site A: 19 dBA Western Digital Green Power
site B: 48.8 dBA Western Digital Green Power

the differences in those two readings are primarily due to a cheap sound meter in use by site B, positioned way too close to the drive to be accurate, comparable, useful data.

If you didn't notice it in the other thread I linked to, here are some SPCR readings of hard drives

Code: Select all

SPL levels of recommended SPCR items measured from 1 meter

17-20 dBA  Samsung M40 MP0402H
19-21 dBA  Western Digital Green Power WD7500AACS
19-21 dBA  Seagate Momentus 5400.3 ST9160821AS
20-21 dBA  Seagate Momentus 5400.2 ST9120821AS
20-23 dBA  Samsung Spinpoint T HD400LJ
21-23 dBA  Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS
21-26 dBA  Samsung Spinpoint P80 SP0802N
21-26 dBA  Western Digital Raptor WD740GD
saying they were measured from a distance of 1 meter is better than saying inches or feet (unrelated to metric vs other measurements) but you have to follow the link to the article on how SPCR measures to know what angle the microphone is in relation to the hard drive and what the drive was sitting on. There are numerous factors for measuring sound and turning it into a single number which is why SPCR stores audio files and is now showing graphs with much more detail than a single dBA number can give you.

But given all those caveats I still trust SPCR numbers more than any site that says a hard drive is 40+ dba at idle
Last edited by dhanson865 on Wed Apr 22, 2009 8:51 am, edited 5 times in total.

__Miguel_
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Post by __Miguel_ » Wed Apr 22, 2009 8:39 am

Got it.

Perfect explanation, thanks!

Now, why isn't there a "Vote Up" option on the replies?

Cheers.

Miguel

davewolfs
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Post by davewolfs » Thu Apr 23, 2009 9:31 pm

Any chance that the RE4 will have similar acoustics, it's rated the same by WD.

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