Story:
I was running a Dell Inspiron 1501 notebook with a stock Hitachi 5400rpm hard drive. It was almost inaudible and not much vibration could be felt through the casing, but it was also very slow ...2007 slow. Still, with CrystalCPUID I managed to keep the computer's fan from revving up under most circumstances.
As 2.5" HDDs are lowering in price, I figured I'd jump on a deal for a 7200rpm 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Black, the biggest in it's line with free fall sensor to boot. It was much faster, but also introduced a fair bit of vibration and -- the horror! -- a permanent *shhhssssss* sound.
And the notebook's fan kept on annoyingly starting up when then the PC was completely idle and fresh from a boot-up. I had read rapidly on NewEgg a majority of reports of "It's so quiet I can't hear it!" and "No vibration whatsoever". They probably all forgot to mention "...when installed in my url=http://gizmodo.com/5015525/the-gas+powe ... asculinity]gas-powered blender![/url]". Very few were mentioning realistic vibration, heat, and noise levels. True, I should have done more research, but even SPCR reviews were scarce then.So I sprung up for its cheaper WB Scorpio Blue 320GB cousin, sans free-fall sensor. It's a better experience, at the cost of in-between performance. This HD is running 8C cooler than it's speedier counterpart, has minimal vibration and the noise is no longer an offense. Throughput is obviously reduced, but still speedy enough. It is a quite acceptable drive, quiet while not silent, more so for SPCR-type ears. The notebook's fan still starts up at regular intervals however.
My main PC runs on a WD Caviar Green 1TB unit, and while louder than a Scorpio Blue and more vibration than any of the Scorpios, it has almost the same performance as the Scorpio Black ...only bigger!
Scorpio Black will now find its way to my quiet desktop PC ...until I end up selling both Scorpios and acquiring 2 Samsung-made SSDs when the prices drop a little bit more and cache-enabled models become more popular (end of summer, I guess).
Results: (inside notebook)
2.5" 80GB Stock Hitachi HTS541680J9S:
+ almost inaudible
+ almost no vibration
+ cool-ish
- slow (5400rpm, 33.9 MB/s read average, 19.1ms access time)
2.5" 320GB WD Scorpio Black WD3200BJKT:
- definitely audible
- vibrates too much to my liking
- hot (50C)
+ fast (7200rpm, 64.9 MB/s read average, 14.5ms access time)
2.5" 320GB WD Scorpio Blue WD3200BEVT:
+ quiet
+ almost no vibration
- warm (41C)
+ medium-fast (5400rpm, 49.3 MB/s read average, 16.8ms access time)
3.5" 1TD WD Caviar Green WD10EACS:
+ medium-fast (5400rpm, 63.4 MB/s read average, 14.9ms access time)
(other aspects irrelevant when compared to 2.5" units.)
HD Tune screenshots:
Hitachi:
Scorpio Black:
Scorpio Blue:
Caviar Green:
