The Best Silent Hard Drive?

The trouble with laptop drives, is despite being very quiet; the capacity is very limited (80GB last I checked), and they are expensive. I don't want an external storage HDD, or have to access files across a network, as the latter relies on the networked PC with the data to be on most of the time.


I have 80gb of MP3's, 250gb of DIVX movies, 20GB of emulator ROM's; probably 40GB for the OS & apps, and I'd like to leave a good 100gb for the video data. [I'd just like to add the fact I have a very large legal DVD & CD collection in case you are wondering from those stats. As for the Rom's thats a grey area..] I'd very much like to fit it all in one case though. I suppose I could have 3 laptop drives, + the a dvd writer on all 4 IDE channels; sounds very expensive though.


I only mentioned the raid as I was hoping the speed advantages may be of use for the realtime video recording. As for backups, everything is backed up anyway to other hard drives; so I'm not bothered about losing anything if a disk fails via Raid 0.

It's all a compromise between capacity, speed, and noise.


I tried both Seagate Baracuda and Samsung Spinpoint drives and eventually switched to a slow spinning quiet laptop drive since they were both to noisy to compete with a dedicated CD transport.


If you want to stay with a 3.5" you are probably want to add some enclosure. The Smartdrive enclosure has gotten some reviews on the usual slient PC sites.

https://www.gup.co.jp/form/oversea.php


Cheers


Thomas

Quote:



Well I think you're going to have to choose then, you can have quiet or a lot of space, but not both. I don't think a 7200rpm drive exists that I'd call quiet, and if you start adding more than one, it just agrivates the problem. It wasn't until I moved all my storage out of my HTPC that I achieved the level of quite I'd been aiming for.


I had my HTPC to the point where the ONLY thing I could hear was my HDD, and it was VERY annoying. Now that I've built my media server and put my storage in another room, my HTPC is for all intents and purposes, silent.

Quote:
But that's my point, there is no performance advantage to RAID-0 in an HTPC. Unless you plan to do something like nonlinear editing of uncompressed video, RAID-0 is of no benefit.

I think the Seagate 7200.8 series (should have

been called Barracuda 8) is pretty quiet. It's

about as quiet as you can buy in 3.5" 7200rpm.

It is also very fast due to the high density.

(For the same spin speed, a newer higher density

drive has a much higher "sustained transfer rate"

to/from the media. There are just more bytes

on each rotation. The cable interface speed

[sata150 pata33 66 100] does not generally

matter because the media speed is the limiting

factor. You can read the "max sustained tranfer

rate to/from media" in the full PDF spec sheet

from each disk maker.) I agree with the others

that raid-0 is fool hardy (2x the chance to loose

all). Although you would get a 1.5 x speed

improvement (2x reduced by "overhead"), a 7200.8

series is overly fast for video anyway. And if

you use raid-0 for our OS, recovery options like

the WinXP recovery console, and 3rd party repair

tools like ERD Commander or Knoppix, become hard

or impossible to use due to the raid-0. I recommend

some care in mounting, like a silent mount kit,

rubber gromets, plastic screws, or some old

bike innertube and silicone sealant.

You will hear less if the drive's vibration doesn't

transmit into the case. Beware of no moving air

near it... it will heat up and die young.

The interface (SATA or PATA-IDE) has no affect

on noise. The likely reason you assumed SATA's

might be more noisy is they may be newer on

average. Faster seek times and RPMs, along with

lower quality control, has meant that many

later model drives are getting more noisy as

each new model comes out. Reliability has

also been going down, but I think not so

much on the 7200.8 series. On some drives

models now made, a 10% failure rate in the

first year is not unheard of. There was a time

several years ago when certain models had only

a 1% failure rate in the first year. The good

old days, but only 20GB on only certain models.

What a fantastic response, I will be a regular now thanks to all your help.


You have talked me out of raid 0 as I may indeed use recovery software like Acronis Trueimage in the event of failure; with 2 drives on raid 0, I'm sure this would complicated things.


As for the level of noise I would tolerate, I should have been more specific. I'd be happy to hear a quiet groan from the system (ie queit background noise) when the hard drive chuggs; but not the level of noise you get from a TIVO, which although not terrible, is very noticable.


I assume the Seagate 7200.8 is available as 250gb SATA? That being the case, I'm happy to go for that.


Bike innertube for insulation, I like that...

Yes, the 7200.8 series (avoid 7200.7 series

I think) comes in SATA or PATA-IDE, and

in these sizes: 200, 250, 300, 400 GB.

Some are less common. The SATA 400GB model is in

short supply right now, so by supply and demand

it is priced about $100 more than it is worth.

But the others are reasonable. Samsung IDE disks

are said to be as quiet or more quiet. I don't

know. I don't trust Samsung HDD longevity as well,

so I never bought any. I think all Western Digital,

Maxtor, and Hitachi-IBM, as well as the off brands

made in New Delhi (AGS?) that are IDE are all

noticably more noisy in their whine than this

Seagate series (or the quiet Samsungs, people say).

I am a consultant, and my clients use and buy

a lot of computers and drives. Your experience is

common. There are 4 major makers and 5th place in

volume Samsung. Don't buy from any but those 5,

because the other makers are either 100% refurb

contractors, or low quality new production.

All 5 of them have had poor reliability on new production

since about 2001 or so. I think they were so busy

tripping over each other to accomodate video and mp3

collector driven size demand, that they forgot about

reliability in the storage increases from 2001 to 2004

or so. I did say I would avoid the 7200.7 series you had

problems in. But I don't think it is any worse than the

Maxtor, Hitachi-IBM or WD products that are comparable in

time of manufacture. I THINK the 7200.8 will turn out

to be better, but I can't be sure because it hasn't

been in the field long enough yet. Manufacture's

quoted MTBF are just plain lies. Also, manufacture's

accelerated aging tests (200 drives running hard in

a hot and humid room) are not a great predictor of

real failure rate in the field.

It is an impossible prediction, because by the time

you know the 3 years-in-use percentage-that-died,

the drives are basically technologically obsolete so

all you can do with that number is see which of your

drives you should get your data off of and retire early.

Most people have strong feelings about a certain

brand's reliability or unreliability that is based

on one or two personal experiences, often very painful

experiences. But these experiences lack statistical

merit, and are misleading. A high failure rate generally

affects only a certain model family, and does not give

rationality to any brand-wide loyalty. In my business, I have

found some sources of actual field failure return rates, and

study those. Also Seagate recently changed from a 3 year

warranty to a 5 year warranty, while Maxtor, Hitachi and WD

have changed from a 3 year warranty to a 1 year

warranty (exception: Raptor, a loud small fast drive).

This may imply Seagate has confidence in new production,

or merely that their marketing department has picked up

on user disatisfaction with high failure rates. I would

buy drives with a 30 day warranty over a 5 year

warranty if I thought statistics indicated the 30 day

drive model would be less likely to fail during the

4 years I will use it. I wrote my own software to

do automatic backups data disk to disk during the day.

But still, when I loose a drive, it takes up a lot of

human time. And many people loose data. By comparison,

the hard drive itself is cheap, and the swap for

a blank refurb drive is small compensation. And I don't

like to use the refurb they send back, because

refurb drives have a much higher future failure rate.

About drives with dead circuit boards...

One of my clients had some important data on a drive

that he had foolishly stopped backing up. Maybe not

important enough for a $5000 fee data recovery company,

but pretty important. Since it was silent and no longer

recognized by the BIOS, I bought a same-model same-year

drive off ebay, and swapped circuit boards. I was

able to recover all his data that way, very cheaply,

making my client very happy. On this model, it worked.

But it is possible some models might use EEPROM

or some other on-circuit-board storage for something

like mapping out defects. But tradtionally, the defect

map is on a special reserved place on the drive media,

so the swap of circuit board worked fine. Typically a

circuit board failure causes your drive to stop being

recognized at all by the BIOS, and no unusual noises

eminate from the dead drive. Typically a mechanical

failure causes "new" noises, errors logged in the

XP / Win2000 / Win2003 "Event Log", or rapid increases

in the "Relocated Sector Count", and "Read Error Rate",

which for PATA-IDE drives can be observed anytime

with the lovely and free program Diskcheckup.exe.

If you know how to read this in SATA, please advice.

Another sign is unusally long delays when copying

files (many retries, and Windows says nothing about

this). Watching these 4 things (noises, Diskcheckup.exe,

and Control Panel | Admin Tools | Event Log, riduculous

delays in file copies) I have been able to replace

about 90% of the ailing drives on my machines or

supported client's machines, while all their data

could still be read (although sometimes slower due to

retries).