Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

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Lawrence Lee
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Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by Lawrence Lee » Tue Dec 20, 2011 5:36 pm


TalkinHorse
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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by TalkinHorse » Wed Dec 21, 2011 2:57 am

I'd had it in my mind that a drive with more than 3 platters would be statistically less reliable. Is that the case for modern drives? Would then this likely be a more reliable 3TB drive? That's assuming the very high platter density isn't itself unreliable.

(I'm not rushing out to buy any drives these days. The shortages will presumably be with us for some number of months.)

jstyles
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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by jstyles » Fri Dec 23, 2011 12:51 pm

I had four of these drives in use and they seem very noisy to me. In fact when I shutdown the computer they make this troubling whining noise. In use they sound a little like popcorn popper.

One of the four I had to RMA it had unrecoverable bad sectors within a week of use.

I am comparing this drive to:
Samsung F4 2TB, WD AVG 3TB, WD Green 2TB drives which are more silent in my systems.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by TalkinHorse » Sat Dec 24, 2011 5:28 pm

jstyles wrote:I had four of these drives in use and they seem very noisy to me. In fact when I shutdown the computer they make this troubling whining noise. In use they sound a little like popcorn popper.
Hmmm. Hard to reconcile that with SPCR statement that "The Barracuda 3TB was easily the quietest high capacity 7200 RPM drive we've tested, measuring 16 dBA@1m when idle and 16~17 dBA@1m when seeking. It emitted a very soft hum without so much as a hint of whine and the seeks were almost unnoticeable."

jstyles
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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by jstyles » Thu Dec 29, 2011 1:14 pm

Possibly I have defective drives since the second of 4 drives has now failed with a unrecoverable sector.
This is after I performed a full zero fill of the drive a week earlier.

With a 50% failure rate for me I am not very happy with these drives, regardless of how they sound.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by HFat » Fri Dec 30, 2011 1:45 am

Drives with a few bad sectors aren't failed.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by Arbutus » Fri Dec 30, 2011 8:38 pm

jstyles wrote:I had four of these drives in use and they seem very noisy to me. In fact when I shutdown the computer they make this troubling whining noise.
You might be getting inter-modulation noises. The case can act like a guitar body and 'amplify' the resonances.
jstyles wrote:In use they sound a little like popcorn popper.
If they are in a RAID array then they all seek at the same time and you can get some very annoying noises.
jstyles wrote:One of the four I had to RMA it had unrecoverable bad sectors within a week of use.
Modern HDD's have no bad sectors visible on the user side. Any surface flaws are automatically remapped to the spare area.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by HFat » Sun Jan 01, 2012 10:03 am

You can see bad sector counts with SMART and some models require you to use a special utility to reallocate the sectors (as of a few years ago anyway).

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by Luke M » Sun Jan 01, 2012 12:10 pm

Bad sectors on a factory fresh drive are invisible to the user. They don't cause errors. Any errors are a result of either a soft (non-repeatable) write error or a new permanently bad sector.

Errors should be very rare on new drives. You generally only see errors on old drives which are failing. On the other hand, 3TB is a lot of data and the more data you write, the greater the chance of an error.

HFat
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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by HFat » Sun Jan 01, 2012 12:26 pm

Don't quote me on this (verify for yourself) but this isn't what Google found. I think they got a slight bathtube effect.
I also got bad sectors on newish drives (though not often).

jstyles
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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by jstyles » Mon Jan 30, 2012 11:25 am

Just to clarify I had non recoverable bad sectors on two out of five drives, now that two of them have been replaced.
Non recoverable bad sectors are when the drive has a bad sector that cannot be marked as bad and spare used to replace it.

I am not using these in raid.

The sound I hear with the new drives is I guess when it is parking the heads during no use or at power off, it is very noticeable.

I use these in HTPC or USB 3.0 external enclosure, so they are low usage drives, which makes the failure rate of 2 out of 5 seem a even worse. The last drive received was manufactured in China, the previous 4 from Thailand so maybe that will make a difference.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by wwenze » Sun Jul 29, 2012 8:22 am

I bought the 2TB version of this (ST2000DM001) after reading this review. The noise (which is apparently due to head parking) is very obvious, as pointed out by numerous others on the internet.

This thing does not make it as a silent PC drive. A warning needs to be placed at the end of the review instead of a gold recommendation.

Add: Windows 7, AHCI and newest firmware (CC4H). China made in Jun '12

Add2: hdparm managed to make it shut up, at least so far I only heard something once.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by =assassin= » Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:15 pm

I've just bought the 2Tb version and I'm getting the chirping, I can live with it if the drive isn't going to die because of it, I find it worrying nonetheless.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by thebluebumblebee » Sat May 04, 2013 11:50 am

Newegg has this on sale today. I was going to use my older WD 640GB Blue in a new build (secondary drive behind a SSD). Can I compare the noise level tests for that test http://www.silentpcreview.com/article847-page3.html, at that time to the current tests?

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by CA_Steve » Sat May 04, 2013 12:05 pm

The noise floor of the testing area back then was 17 dBA. Now, it's 10-11 dBA and some of the equipment is different/better. So, the seek noise of 22 dBA for the WD 640 Blue back then would probably translate to something slightly less than 22 dBA if tested today.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by fuzzymath10 » Sun May 05, 2013 9:24 am

Empirically, it is a very quiet 7200rpm drive so I wouldn't worry. It has a low hum which is quite hard to hear. No buzzing or grinding noises. The only drive I would consider getting instead is the Caviar Red but it is usually more expensive.

EricTerminator
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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by EricTerminator » Sun Nov 30, 2014 1:40 am

Hi !

I just bought this HDD in order to replace a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB and a Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB, because they were quite high on the power on counts, with 42K and 30K hours respectively, and also because they created a beat frequency when powered on, and seemed to make my Windows 7 Pro 64-bit bug when shutting down the PC, as I use the option to turn off HDDs after 1 minute of inactivity.

To be fair, I'm not 100% sure my Seagate Barracuda 3TB is the same version as the one tested, as it's a STD3000DM001-1CH166 according to CrystalDiskInfo. But my observations are that it emits a very-high pitch noise when powered on, probably some noise associated to the spindles spinning ; I tried to get a sound spectrum with my headset's mic and UltimateSound 2, but it's hard to pinpoint what's the whistling I can hear. Here are the spectrums I get with the microphone (for which I don't know the frequency response) touching the front bottom of my PC when idle, with the HDD writing some data though that doesn't affect the whistling :
spectrum%201.png
The first spectrum is from 0 to 1391.6 Hz.
spectrum%202.png
The second one is from 0 to 22265 Hz.

The biggest peak, that is highly visible on the first figure, is the HDD's rotation speed at 120 Hz. The remainder of the spectrum seems to be some broadband noise, but for some reason, my ears can hear that high-pitch whistling. I should remark that this whistling is probably not disturbing for most people ; it's less than the whining my TV does when turned on. And while it does make more noise than the PC's fans and watercooling when idle, those are 1 140mm fan at around 500rpm, 2 120mm fans at around 500-700 rpm, 2 80mm fans at around 1000 rpm, and a Corsair H90, which does make a slight ticking noise caused by some air bubbles, all placed in a Corsair Carbide 300R recovered with a decent amount of soundproofing material, especially around the HDD cage.

The bottom line is while this HDD is probably one of the quietest 7200 rpm HDDs on the market, it does produce some high-pitch whistling that can disturb people highly sensitive to high-frequency noise.
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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by MikeC » Sun Nov 30, 2014 8:55 am

Funny that nothing shows up in your spectrum captures. Maybe it's too narrow & directional. Or perhaps the scale of the charts is too tight. Try Audacity.

fyi... A lot of what people hear as very high pitched whining turns out to be relatively low in frequency, often below the highest note on a piano (~4khz). One way to determine the frequency of the noise is to try and match its pitch with a music instrument -- if you have a piano, electronic organ, whatever, play notes to match the pitch. Just for an exercise in curiosity if nothing else.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by EricTerminator » Sun Nov 30, 2014 10:34 am

Thanks for the tips ; here are the spectrums with Audacity, same position for the microphone :

HDD powered on :
spectrum1.png
HDD powered off :
spectrum2.png
The HDD adds essentially 4 peaks and some broadband noise ; those peaks are at approx. 2.38kHz, 3.46kHz, 4.27kHz and 4.53kHz. Also note that the tail of the spectrum ends at 7.2kHz with the HDD off, and 8.9kHz with the HDD on.

The 2 first peaks seem to match those from the review, but not too sure about the last 2 :

Image

Also note the microphone's position is different from the SPCR's HDD testing methodology ; if you watch the HDD from the side with the connectors, the microphone is about 8cm to the left, the HDD being horizontal, and with a 140mm fan and the front bezel between the mic and the HDD.

There may also be a few centimeters of height difference between the HDD and the mic, as the HDD is at the slot just above the bottom one : http://www.anandtech.com/show/6055/cors ... e-masses/2

Image

And the mic touches the front bezel a few centimeters below the front logo : http://www.anandtech.com/show/6055/cors ... the-masses

Image

Another remark ; the HDD sled from the Corsair Carbide 300R isn't used "as is", as there are some slightly loose tolerances between the sled and the HDD cage, which could potentially amplify the HDD's vibrations ; the HDD has been tightly screwed to the sled and the sled's hollows on the side have been (over)filled with some strips cut from a polyurethane foam sheet and covered with some duct tape, which makes for a tighter fit with the HDD cage and absorbs some vibrations.
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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by MikeC » Sun Nov 30, 2014 11:23 am

The obvious reason for the steep downslope of your curves is the mic touching the chassis -- it's vibration conduction. Don't let the mic touch anything. Ours floats in an elastic suspension, which is pretty standard for mics.

The peaks would in the first curve would certainly be audible. Hard to tell which one iis the one that bothers you, but you could find out -- by float-mounting the HDD w/ elastic in the top optical drive cage & then putting a flat dense piece of rubber atop the drive & listening & looking for changes in the spectrum. The sound/peak that drops when you place the rubber piece on might help identify which peak it is. OTOH, if all the peaks reduce & the sound becomes nicer for you... well, then mission accomplished, right? :wink:

The whining you hear could be coming not directly from the drive but by some higher harmonic of a part in the chassis being stimulated by the HDD's vibrations, so the HDD suspension could eliminate altogether.

I have had success reducing HDD noise with things as simple as place a large, preferably heavy eraser (or similar block of rubber) atop a normally mounted drive, or applying just a small amount of pressure on such an eraser.

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Re: Seagate Barracuda 3TB: 1TB Platter Behemoth

Post by EricTerminator » Thu Dec 11, 2014 7:14 pm

Hi again.

Was a little busy.

Here are the new spectrums made with the mic a few centimeters away from the front bezel's logo, with no contact.

HDD on :
spectrum 1.png
HDD off :
spectrum 2.png
So there's quite a difference in the noise spectrum of my PC when the HDD is on, though I'm not completely sure if the spectrum above 7 kHz is the whistling that disturbs me, as those high-frequency peaks are 10-15 dB (according to the microphone, whose frequency response isn't known) below the other ones.

When I'll have some spare time, I'll remove the HDD from the tower and measure new spectrums to conclude if the chassis is the culprit.
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