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What brand hard drives are the quietest?

J

jrichrds

Platinum Member
I had 13GB and 15GB 5400rpm Western Digital hard drives before, and man, were they noisy! The seeks were so loud. Then I got a Maxtor 20GB 5400rpm and I can't hear the drive at all!

This was all a while back. What brands these days make the quietest drives, or have they all advanced to being whisper-quiet?

(A little off-topic, but other than enabling SMART monitoring in my BIOS, do I need an accompanying Windows program to receive SMART alerts? Or will the BIOS take care of it?)
 
(A little off-topic, but other than enabling SMART monitoring in my BIOS, do I need an accompanying Windows program to receive SMART alerts? Or will the BIOS take care of it?)
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? can't help you here sorry

but check outwww.storagereview.com for harddrive stats as well as noise ratings

hope this helps
 
jrichrds, I've installed four Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB'ers recently, and to a drive they are stone silent. I've also installed one of the Maxtor L drives, and while it's quiet, it still has spin and seek noises that the BIV doesn't have. The only time I'd recommend you not look at the BIV drive is if you're going to set two of them up in a RAID configuration. Seagate has recently admitted what the web community has known for a while - that the BIV has RAID issues. They'll replace the drive(s) upon request w/ drives that RAID better, but then the single drive performance suffers. Let's hope this isn't an issue w/ whatever Seagate has coming down the pike to replace the BIV - BV or Serial ATA.
 
I don't buy into this "it's so quiet I can't hear it" crap. Look at storage review. I compared my Maxtor D740X (loud as all hell) to the Barracuda IV. The Maxtor's idle noise rating is 46.3 dB/A while the Seagate is 41.3 dB/A. They are BOTH louder than my CPU fan. ALOT louder.
 
Originally posted by: puck
I don't buy into this "it's so quiet I can't hear it" crap. Look at storage review. I compared my Maxtor D740X (loud as all hell) to the Barracuda IV. The Maxtor's idle noise rating is 46.3 dB/A while the Seagate is 41.3 dB/A. They are BOTH louder than my CPU fan. ALOT louder.
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The numbers are worthless if you don't know what they mean and how they were taken. You clearly didn't read how SR comes up with their noise ratings which is by placing a mic 18mm away from the drive in an isolated environment. That's about 0.7in away from the drive. I don't know about you, but I don't tape my hard drives to my ears in a dead silent room. The noise produced by these drives inside a case a few feet away from you will be significantly quieter.

The Barracuda IV and basically every Fujitsu IDE drive are considered very quiet.
 
I don't buy into this "it's so quiet I can't hear it" crap. Look at storage review. I compared my Maxtor D740X (loud as all hell) to the Barracuda IV. The Maxtor's idle noise rating is 46.3 dB/A while the Seagate is 41.3 dB/A. They are BOTH louder than my CPU fan. ALOT louder.
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You are dead wrong! I have used a bunch of Seagate Barracuda IV's and they are dead silent. You may be able to hear a slight noise if you literally put your ear to the drive. Otherwise you will not hear it at all. I highly recommend these drives.
 
No need to attack me there Pariah. Sorry I pissed off the godly "platinum member" status. Sorry I don't average over 3 posts per day.

The B-IV is roughly 3 times quieter than my Maxtor based on the logarithmic nature of the decibel scale, but we should all be impressed by the new Seagate U6 with an idle noise of 38.8 dB/A @ 18mm. This is about 1.78 times quieter than the B-IV, but the U6 performs much lower on all the performance tests at storage review.
 
Originally posted by: puck
I don't buy into this "it's so quiet I can't hear it" crap. Look at storage review. I compared my Maxtor D740X (loud as all hell) to the Barracuda IV. The Maxtor's idle noise rating is 46.3 dB/A while the Seagate is 41.3 dB/A. They are BOTH louder than my CPU fan. ALOT louder.
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Wrong!! Like the others said, seagates drives are some of the quietess on the market.
 
Seagate drives are supposed to be the quietest but not as fast as some of the other hard drives.

I heard the D740X by Maxtor was a good drive, but some people complained that after a month or too, it started getting louder, and that's supposedly a sign that it's dying.

I dunno, hard drives can be so weird, lol.
 
Didn't Seagate get bought out by another manufacturer a while back? Who's actually making those Seagate drives now?

Idle noise has never really been an issue with my drives. It's more when the drive is active...that's when the all the WD drives I have (from 3GB to 15GB) really make some noise.

it started getting louder, and that's supposedly a sign that it's dying.
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No one here monitors or knows how to monitor their hard drives through S.M.A.R.T.?
 

As many other people already said: Seagate Barracuda IV

I was really surprised how quiet those drives are, actually when booting the first time with one of those HDDs I rechecked if it was connected to power.

On the other hand it's true that the B-IVs are not the fastest HDDs, but fast enough in my opinion for the comfort they provide. A real drawback is the questionable performance with standard- or onboard-RAID-CONTROLLERS, though in another thread somebody pointed out that the performance would be alright with top-of-the-line-controllers from the different manufacturers, i.e. the PROMISE SX6000 (at least that's what we were told by PROMISE-support two weeks ago when we needed HDDs for a server as quiet as possible).

BTW, some people have the opinion that the 60GB- and 80GB-models would be louder than the 40GB-model: not true to our experience, there's no difference.
 
I have 2 western digital special edition 120GB drives and I have never heard them above my vantec stealth fans which i only have 2 of 92mm and 80mm. I have to look at the HD LED to see if they are accessing!

Very quiet!
 
I think a lot of people here are forgetting that the numbers don't tell the full story. One person's drive might sound louder than another person's drive of the same model for a number of reasons, namely case acoustics (thin/thick, aluminum/steel), drive mounting, ambient noise, fan/drive noise and how they fit on audible sensitivity curves, etc.

There are some cases out there that'll amplify drive noise like no tomorrow, regardless of how quiet running the drive is. And not everyone's as sensitive to noise as others and even if they were, my "dead quiet" could be your "noisy." Let's also not forget that drives tend to wear down and get a little noisier with age.

Keep that in mind if you're going to throw accusations around, indirectly calling each other liars.
rolleye.gif
 
Originally posted by: Cosmic_Horror
Another vote for seagate barracuda IV. My 80gb is quieter (a little) than my 40Gb IBM 60GXP hard drive.
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I have the 60GXP IBM 40 GB and 60 GB. They are very quiet indeed. I'm not aware that they can ever be heard above the noise of the fans in my box - Back exhausting, side inhaling, CPU and video main chip. One of the main things that attracts me to a laptop is the possibility that it will be relatively quiet. Anyway, my fan noise isn't grating - it's something I can live with. Now, my old Creative 8x4x32 CDRW drove me up the wall.

 
I'm going to jump back in here and simply expand on my before-mentioned observations re the BIV. I've never not heard a drive like this. I have it installed in an Enlight 7237 case, w/ the ubiquitous three-fan hard drive cooler, and you literally cannot hear the drive. Do I need the hd cooler for this drive? Probably not, but it does aid in overall airflow in this case. Besides my drive I've installed at least three others - two w/o the hd cooler setup, and one w/ and they are virtually silent.

I too have read of the Maxtor L drives developing a high pitched whine after as little as a couple months use.

Re speed of the BIV vs. Maxtor/WD/IBM/etc. I have my BIV connected to the primary channel of a HighPoint 372 controller (on board an EPoX 4SDA+) and it is w/o a doubt the fastest drive setup I've owned.
 
Another vote for Seagate Barracuda IVs.

My 60 GB one is so quiet that I can't hear it at all even under heavy disk I/O and the only way I can tell if it's doing anything is to look at the LED.
 
Hi,

I just bought a 80/83GB IBM Deskstar 120GXP ATA100 7500RPm 2MB Cache HDD at Fry's Electronics for $96.21 total, and I cannot hear it do anything. The only way I can tell it's working is by watching the light on the case... Very nice.

The 10GB MaXtor ATA33 7200RPm that It replaced was just the opposite, it was very noisy... It sounded like it was grinding corn...

From now on it's IBM for this guy.

Love You!
HumbleFish
 
So it sounds like most drives from the 15GB and under days were noisier, and all newer drives have the technologies to suppress noise. Perhaps I should have asked...does anyone have a name-brand drive above 40GB that is noisy? 🙂
 
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