So I was excited to purchase a new drive when my old drive filled up. My previous one is an HD503HI; let me tell you this drive is silent!!! I cannot feel the case vibrating at all and if I put my ear to it I cannot hear idle or seek. I have it in a Silenx enclosure but it is not necessary. My new drive, the HD155UI vibrates the case, I can hear a high pitched whine (although my hearing is more sensitive than probably 95% of people) and I hear the seek as well.

My question is, is there a lot of variance with hard drives? Have others had experience with this drive? I will try putting this one in the SilenX enclosure, but I am considering buying a WD Green drive instead. I was hesitant on buying it when I saw 20-25% of consumers rating only 1 star because of failures. Also, what is the most silent drive over 1TB others have used? I am not concerned with performance.

I've used a few of those drives yes what you get is pretty much what I found they're not the worst though (WD Blacks probably the worst for vibration I've used)
WD Greens are decent as in quietness reliability is hard to judge..I got a couple of Hitachi 5K3000's last week for a new buld job and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with them performance is really very good and vibrations are much lower than the normal 7200 rpm drives.

I'd def lean in the 5K3000 direction they're new to the market and grab em before WD merge with Hitachi!

None of my 6 Samsung F3 2TB drives vibrates noticably, and none emit any noises that are noticable, (e.g. high-pitched), and they all work perfectly after long period of use.

The F4's seem to be a bit better still.

You might not know that the way you screw the HDD into the case can make a lot of difference, loosen all of the screws (with the PC off), and make sure the HDD is totally flat (push down on it gently) whilst tightening the screws, in some cases (pun intended) it can make a huge difference, in others - none.


Andy

This is my first experience with a high capacity multi-platter drive. Perhaps it is just to be expected that it won't be as quiet as a 500gb hard drive. I will try playing with the alignment and the screws to see if I can improve it. And I will do some research on those Hitachi drives. I am still a big fan of Samsung though...