Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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judelaw
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Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by judelaw » Fri Mar 08, 2019 1:06 pm

Hi everyone ! What is the most silent hard drive I can buy today in 2019? Even if it's 1TB or even 500gb.
No ssd.

CA_Steve
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Re: Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by CA_Steve » Fri Mar 08, 2019 1:42 pm

internal: 2.5" Seagate or Samsung 5400rpm class drive.
external: I've had good experience with WD My passports.

Why no SSD? They are down in the $50-70 range for 500GB.

Abula
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Re: Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by Abula » Fri Mar 08, 2019 4:33 pm

CA_Steve wrote:Why no SSD? They are down in the $50-70 range for 500GB.
I second steve suggestion, specially since you dont seem to need a lot of storage, there some cheap options,

NVME
Intel 512GB 660P NVMe M.2 Internal SSD $80

SATA
Crucial 500GB MX500 2.5" Internal SSD $70

judelaw
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Re: Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by judelaw » Sat Mar 09, 2019 2:19 pm

I don't know what is safer to store data between ssd and hard disk. I have backup of course. I will need two drives, one for intensive writes/rewrites (torrents and downloads, a lot of them), another one for data I don't want to loose (mostly word documents, pictures ).

CA_Steve
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Re: Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by CA_Steve » Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:09 pm

An SSD has less likelihood of failure than a mechanical drive. That said, the best way to protect docs is to store backups in several locations - no single point of failure. For docs, I use an encrypted folder on my OS (SSD) drive. That gets backed up daily to an internal mechanical drive...and when I remember (usually monthly), I copy the folder and store it on alternate thumb drives. Maybe once a year, I copy the internal rotating drive to an external one. If I had a NAS, I'd back up to that, too :)

Windows always eventually craps out and you have to rebuilt the system. But, I've managed to keep my docs safe.

judelaw
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Re: Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by judelaw » Sat Mar 09, 2019 6:25 pm

An SSD has less likelihood of failure than a mechanical drive
Here's a debate about it : https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/co ... your_data/
I don't know what to think, I haven't got any knowledge.

CA_Steve
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Re: Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by CA_Steve » Sat Mar 09, 2019 6:37 pm

Yeah, I'm not going to read through a reddit thread :)

In short - SSDs have no mechanical failure mechanism and a normal user will never ever go through the number of write cycles needed to run it into the ground For grins, just look at WDC's warranty page and compare the consumer HDDs (2-3 yr) to the SSDs (3-5yr).

Abula
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Re: Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by Abula » Sat Mar 09, 2019 7:44 pm

judelaw wrote:
An SSD has less likelihood of failure than a mechanical drive
Here's a debate about it : https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/co ... your_data/
I don't know what to think, I haven't got any knowledge.
I would go SSD storage if it was cheaper, i have no doubt that what keeps us still on mechanical is pricing. Go with a good brand of ssds (samsung, crucial and intel are my gotto brands), now a days they are some offering 5+ years on warranty, that you only get on high end enterprise server grade hdds.

And if your data is important, and you dont want to risk it, make sure you do backups to an external drive and/or a NAS and/or cloud service.

Klusu
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Re: Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by Klusu » Sun Mar 10, 2019 4:26 am

A HDD for intensive writes. Suspending in springs or rubber strips helps. I use a quite old WDC WD3200AAKS and don't hear it when idle. Almost any HDD would do (not older than this), but the first one you try might be noisy.
Two HDDs is a thing to avoid. Two can be much louder than one.
Or SSD, if you are willing to pay more.
For complete silence - only a SSD. You don't need two SSDs.

t0bi
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Re: Most Silent HDD I can buy in 2019, even small ones

Post by t0bi » Mon Mar 11, 2019 1:14 pm

If you don't want SSD then WD blue is the quietest hard drives IMO.

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