Quietest Hard Drive available....

aphex

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Jul 19, 2001
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Just switched to using a minimac and have my 250gb Maxtor in an external FW enclosure...

It sounds like a jet engine compared to the mini...

Any fairly quiet hd's?
 

Icopoli

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Jan 6, 2005
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Just be prepared that quiet usually means slow and small.

Really quiet drives are 20gb 5400 Seagates, or any other 5400rpm drive.
 

mwmorph

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Dec 27, 2004
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samsung spinpoints(i have one) are fairly fast AND queit. 7200rpm UDMA gets me really good speeds according to a lot of benchmarks(hd tach for one)
 

aphex

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Originally posted by: Icopoli
Just be prepared that quiet usually means slow and small.

Really quiet drives are 20gb 5400 Seagates, or any other 5400rpm drive.

Well its only gonna be used in my external FW drive to store all my music and pictures... Nothing intensive at all....

All i want is quiet... :)
 

mshan

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Nov 16, 2004
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Some over at SPCR are actually saying the new 300 or 320 GB Western Digital SE hard drives are actually very, very quiet.
 

fell8

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Nov 12, 2001
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In my experience, WDs asre extremely quiet. Seagate does pretty good too.
 

cryptonomicon

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Oct 20, 2004
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honestly doest matter to me, almost any drive could be quiet once you suspend the drive and most of the noise goes away. it took me a while to figure this out ( i eliminated all the noise in my case, down to just the hard drive ) and then I was like... OH. Just suspend the hard drive and look at the difference. However seagate is a fairly quiet drive *after* the break in period with the stupid diagnostic buzzing sounds.
 

aphex

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Originally posted by: cryptonomicon
honestly doest matter to me, almost any drive could be quiet once you suspend the drive and most of the noise goes away. it took me a while to figure this out ( i eliminated all the noise in my case, down to just the hard drive ) and then I was like... OH. Just suspend the hard drive and look at the difference. However seagate is a fairly quiet drive *after* the break in period with the stupid diagnostic buzzing sounds.

This is going in an external FW drive... Very prone to vibrations.....
 
Mar 20, 2005
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i just stuck a 60gb WD 7200 (i had laying around) in a vantec nexstar3 enclosure, just to have an extra back-up drive, and lo-und-behold i did not expect it to be quiet since it would be sitting next to my monitor on my desk... i was surprised to find hardly a whimper from it... tho, my next build i will be using the samsung 160gb spinpoints...
 

mshan

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Nov 16, 2004
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I believe a lot of Western Digital hard drives manufactured after January of this year are supposed to be quiet (fluid dynamic bearings). I think the 300 and 320 GB JD drives are very recent, so that's why some at SPCR mentioned them.
 

Varun

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Aug 18, 2002
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I have a Spinpoint P80 120GB and it's very quiet, plus decent performance.
 

mechBgon

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Cheetah 15k.3 on the far end of a 10-meter SCSI cable would be pretty quiet :D
 

RichUK

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Feb 14, 2005
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Originally posted by: The Pentium Guy
Seagate ATA drives are quiet, I haven't heard much about the SATA drives

im sure they would be the same ..as most same make/model SATA and IDE drives internally are alike .. just the external interface is different