I initially had a WD10EADS, which was pretty loud. Added a Samsung HD204UI, which is much quieter. I didn't see a review for the WD10EADS, but did see one for the WD--EACS. Looks like the newer generation of WD drives is much quieter? Plus, Samsung drives are no longer Samsung made since they are owned by Seagate now? What are users' preferred choice nowadays? Not looking to purchase a WD Red until they get more back in stock.

In general, WD Greens are also very quiet, practically as quiet as the recently reviewed WD Reds (the hardware is also the same, more or less.)

For example, take a look at this review:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/New_3TB_W ... Hard_Drive

For ultimate silence, perhaps you could consider a quiet 2,5" drive coupled with a Scythe Quiet Drive 2,5. This could even be further suspended if needed. The following link is for a very quiet 500 GB WD Scorpio Blue (Editor's Choice award at SPCR)

http://www.silentpcreview.com/WD_VR1000_SB500

Thanks. Are WD20EARS models discontinued? They are at least hard to find. All I see for good deals are EARX models, which are four-platter models. EDIT: actually there seems to be both three and four platter models of the EARX drive...

What about the low capacity drives? I don't think they have so many platters in them.

Hi, I have a WD green WD20EARX and it's pretty quiet, when soft mounted at least. This is 5400rpm (ish) 2TB SATA III drive and seems to be readily available.
Some of the recent Hitachi drives have received favourable SPCR reviews recently and should be available to buy easily too.

Seb

Need it for storage, not as primary drive (that's running on SSD), but fewer platters = fewer parts for failure. I might risk it, haha.

Well, I'd simply go for a WD Green with as many GB/$ as possible.

Do not get a Seagate "Samsung F4". It is sooo loud. click click click...

I will need to sell it off now that I can't return it.

I've successfully silenced (set AAM) on two of these Seagate/Samsungs using HDDScan

Agreed. They are all the same except newer models have larger buffers. None will be louder than any other drive you might be using. If vibrations are an issue, suspension will be your only cure.

I will be using 2.5" drives in my desktop only (when I get around to reinstalling Win7, that is).
I use Toshiba drives, 5K 1TB 9.5mm (because I got them on sale), I avoid WD because of the head park issue (likely only an issue for dual boot with Linux/Win).
I still have one older 500GB 5K Samsung disk and it is the loudest component in my system, when the CPU fan is below 800RPM.

I wish that did the trick, but it didn't. The seeks still makes the same scratching sound.

Kind of sad cause that Seagate could do this. I have to call Seagate to ask whats up.. or maybe just sell this and move back to WDC.

I'm looking to build a Synology DS213 NAS with 2 5400 drives. It seems WD Reds [WD20EFRX] are the best for this purpose?

The SPCR article for that article had a pretty quiet recording [this one], but I'm wondering what other options exist?

The WD Red is built for NAS; it has some kind of RAID feature support. I'm going to run the NAS in RAID 1 probably and power it off for the night.

I might as well just get two of those, but I'm wondering if there are other options.

I'm in the same boat... looking to buy 4x 3tb drives for storage purposes.

Was originally planning to get WD red drives, but they cost $200 each here, whereas green drives can be bought for $140. Not sure if the red drives are worth the 40% price premium over the greens.

Does anybody know if the most recent greens (WD30EZRX) are using 3x 1tb platters? Or still 4x 750gb?

Cheers

This thread http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=63055 mentions the following:

"It's upped the platter capacity to 750GB and rotation speed to 6600rpm over the previous model."

I definitely want a 5400 model. The Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 is 5940RPM. The Seagate Barracuda Green sports a 5900 motor. So that leaves only the WD ones and Samsung F4 EcoGreen. The EcoGreen recording has a reasonably pleasant sound (to me) but loud seeks, the WD Red 3TB is pretty loud in comparison (I think) but the 1TB again has a nice character, so 2TB would be in between.

But WD Red has this "time-limited error recovery" that, according to the review, "is almost essential for RAID configurations to avoid data loss when errors are encountered". It is not really essential to avoid data loss, it is essential to avoid a disk being dropped by the RAID array under high I/O load when errors are encountered [article]. The downside is that such disks cannot be used in non-RAID environments. I don't really understand how a disk can stop responding for a full 8 seconds while not crashing the system, but maybe it just stops responding to controller commands, I don't know. So the Red drives can only be used in RAID configs where there is redundancy in the form of a RAID 1 mirror, or RAID 5 parity - it seems - because otherwise the disk might postpone error correction causing sector reads to fail. But only under high load.

Your RAID dropping disks is pretty nasty. Something apparently often encountered by Synology users, in any case.

My 3TB Red is the quietest drive I've ever had. When I was setting it up I had it in one of those "toaster" external docks and I couldn't believe it was running because it was so quiet. I had to get my ear within a foot to get a whooshing sound. Never noticed seek noise. It completely disappeared once inside my case. YMMV.


I was worried about this as well. I think we had a short discussion on it in the thread for the recent SPCR article on the Red drives. Conclusion was that TLER would probably not be noticeable in a desktop (non-RAID) environment. I bought mine based on this and have had no problems so far. I use it in my desktop PC as my mass storage drive (SSD runs the OS). Works great, but I've only had it a few weeks.

I would think so too - that the Red drive would give no problems in desktop. I just read that thread. Makes sense. The worst thing that can happen is that a sector goes bad a little faster than usual and your application gets an I/O error. Perhaps this results in a sector lost and a file corrupt. Most likely it would have happened anyway.

I feel pretty comfy about it now.

I just happened to make an update to that thread concerning this. I'd appreciate if anyone can confirm. Thanks.
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