Seagate 200GB Barracuda 7200.9 vs Western Digital 200GB Caviar SE

[btabios]

Hey guys, I'm so sick of of my Maxtor 200GB DiamondMax 10 SATA drive. I can hear it above all the other fans in my case. Does anyone have any of these drives? How loud are they (seek noise)?

Can anyone recommend a good 200gb, quiet drive? Its for an SATA setup.

 

[WobbleWobble]

You can turn down the seek noise by changing the AAM value on your drive at the cost of a bit of performance. I've also noticed that the DM10 line induces a lot of vibration into the case, if you go with a suspended hard drive setup you can signifcantly reduce noise.

If you really want a new drive, I'd go for a Samsung one.

 

[btabios]

I was looking into a Samsung 200GB SpinPoint P120, but I don't want to take a performance hit. From the reviews I've seen these drives seem to be the quietest of the 200gb sata's.

How do you enable AAM?

 

[WobbleWobble]

Maxtor used to have its own utility to change it called amset, but I think they removed it.

Hitachi's Drive Feature Tool should have the ability to change the AAM value on any hard drive (that supports it).