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Quiet hard drives

B

Brambory

Junior Member
After putting silent fans in the case, the annoying high pitched whine from the IBM 13.6 7200 drive at idle is like fingernails on the blackboard. With drives being made for home video you'd think that they would have some truly silent ones now, like in the new Apple cube thing with no fan. I see the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus and the Quantum Fireball Plus being touted as quiet, but how quiet? Anybody out there as fussy as I am about noise?
 
Quantum LM is not quiet. They're one of the noisiest drive I've used. Quantum's drive has never been quiet. The IBM 75GXP are quiet. Why not try them?
 
Brambory:

The Quantum Fireball Plus LM is not that quiet, but the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40/45 are extremely quiet hard drives, they're cheap and they're fast, great buys.
 
I have a Maxtor 20 gig 7200, and a WD of same make up. Can't hear anything at idle, and not much of anything from either one while working -- and I run with my case off. So I call em both "super" quiet.

At one time I had an IBM 10 gig 7200 and that also was next to silent, so I'm surprised to read that you have a noisy 13.6. Is it possible that it is defective?
 
I dont hear either of my drives at idle (see sig) I hear the maxtor only when it winds up.Right when it starts to wind it makes an odd squeak noise but when it gets to speed it blends quite nicly with the PSU Fan. It hard to hear the "crunching" sound over the TV during disk access.
Edit:
Loudest drive in my book are Seagate.
 
my deskstar made by IBM 14.4 gig 7200 rpm aint quiet and it produce the noisy loud pitch althou very silently but you can felt it, and eventually it will annoy you.
 
I squelched the din by overcompensating with a gazillion cooling fans on my case, cpu, vid card. I like to think of it as white noise....zzzzzzzzzzzzz
 
There actually is some kind of whisper mode integrated in the latest HD families (Automatic Acoustic Managment). Maxtor has a program to activate it on their site, with others like IBM and Seagate you need to do it yourself through the debug command. It does bring a 10-30 % performance hit.

And if you really take noice over performance you can always go with the silent drives from fujitsu (eg. MPE3 136AT-T), but make sure you get an OEM version, cause these use the special type of layers to quiet things down.

Menel.
 
I would also go for a IBM 75GXP drive. The Maxtor DM Plus 40 drives makes quite a lot of idle noise, but it seeks are quite quiet, but the high pitch whine is driving me crazy 😉 Quantum drives have very loud seeks, but the idle noise it very quiet!
 
Get an IBM 40GV, it's a 20gig / platter 5400rpm, so it should be quiet thanks to the 5400rpm, but still perform decently with 20gig/platter.

my IBM 75GXP is very quiet, but not as quiet as my 5400rpm Fujitsu which I can barely hear when I put my ear right near the hard drives (with case off I mean..with case on I can hear nothing but my PSU fan)
 
I've got a Maxtor DiamondMax 30 gig drive (7200 rpm) and it's quieter than any of my fans. I'm extremely anal about noise, and I couldn't be happier with my purchase (I didn't really believe it was possible to create a drive this quiet).

Everything I've read and heard has put this drive on par with the IBM 75GXP. They're about the same price, so I'd suggest you just buy the first one of them you find on sale.
 
If you want the most quiet drives get yourself some Samsung drives.

Even while doing lots of HD intensive stuff i can not hear the drive,I have to look at the hd light to even notice it working.

They are dead quiet.
 
Current IBM drives have special tech to make them quiet. But if you go over to quietpc.com then you can find hard drive quieteners. I think my 22XGP is very quiet already.
 
My Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 45 makes hardly ANY noise. And if you feel like sacrificing about 6ms of access time, then you can turn on the noise reducer thing (actually the drive ships like this, you have to turn it off to get the extra performance) and it makes NO noise that I can hear. My IBM 22GXP is about 3 times as loud as the Maxtor, and I always considered my IBM quiet.
 
kami:

Are you sure it loses 6ms of acess time by enabling noise reduction? And how much louder does it become if you disable it?
 
I have a Maxtor DM60 46 gig 5400 rpm drive. Its pretty fast, and is the quietest drive I've never heard 😉 [this drive was shipped in the quietest mode possible while holding speed, it is a sub 9ms seek and ultra quiet]

I have that and an IBM Gxp25 15gig 5400rpm drive, and the maxtor smokes it in speed and is A LOT quieter
 
Wait for the IBM60GXP model. The current IBM 75GXPs are whisper quiet,but the 60GXP is suppose to be even more quiet.
 
I know what you mean about that whine. Drove me crazy. My IBM 6.4, 8.4, and WD Expert (IBM tech) had it. I stuck with IBM anyway. I now have the 75GXP 30 gig, and it is SILENT!! No whine, no clackity clack, nothing. I recently put together a system with a Quantum LM 20 gig, and it was quite noisy. Get the new IBM. You will like it.
 
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