Hi!

I'm going to sell my current Western Digital Caviar 250GB SATA HDD to buy something more silent/better. The new HDD will be in regular use in a normal desktop system. Most of the time I listen to music and watch videos, so the drive should be fast enough to load something like anime episodes encoded in XviD or H.264.

Anyone know of any good solution for my needs? Will a 5400RPM drive cut it? Also, are the Western Digital AV HDDs any good? They seem to be optimized for my needs (audio and video), but are they any silent? ...and is there any benefit of having more cache memory (the WD AV has 8MB)??

The HDD must be SATA. That's actually the only criteria. I have thought of getting a 2.5" drive and suspend it in a 3.5" cage, is this a good thought or should I go straight with 3.5" HDDs? EDIT: Size not a big deal... I think 80GB would be OK but to be on the sure side at least 160GB.

Thanks in advance!

You could get a cheap SSD for speed, and a 5400 RPM drive for storage. I'm using an OCZ 1SLD30G and will probably go for a Samsung Ecogreen F2 when they're available.

Forgot to mention my budget range: max around 60€. No SSD fits in that tight budget

I don't know the dollar to euro rate conversion so I'll just post in dollars and hope the info helps you decide:


WD6400AACS ~$70 Quiet low power low heat
WD5000AACS ~$55 Quiet low power but slower than the 640GB version. This should be a last resort as you have 3 better choices at the ~$70 level.

WD6400AAKS ~$65 Ever so slightly less quiet but faster performance

WD6401AALS ~$80 Fastest drive mentioned in this post but most expensive as well
WD5001AALS ~$70 Likely just as fast as the WD6401AALS but only 500GB.

So after Cost which is more important Performance or Power/Noise? We aren't talking about much noise difference but power = money eventually.

I can't imagine considering any drive cheaper than those that would be a clear win vs the 250GB drive you already have and not be a wast of money vs buying in the sweet spot of 500/640GB.

I think Price > Power/Noise > Performance. Will check out the prices for that WD6400AAKS, seems to be the best one. EDIT: Cool, it costs exactly 57.90€ at the local PC store! Sweet!

EDIT2: I'm just thinking for the same price I could get a 2.5" SATA drive (Seagate Momentus 7200RPM with 16MB cache and 80GB space). Is it overkill going for this route to just have something silent?

How much heat will this 640GB drive put out?

I honestly don't know about the direct comparison of the laptop drive vs the desktop drives. I use both but I never bother to put laptop drives in non laptop situations.

As to heat, you can pretty much say that power = heat. It isn't exact but it's close enough for scratch calculations.

Momentus 7200.3 is 2.5 / 2.3 / 0.75 Watts
WD6400AACS is 5.4 / 2.5 / 0.46 Watts
WD6400AAKS is 8.3 / 7.7 / 1.0 Watts

So a Greenpower 640GB drive uses more power at max but less power at min. The Blue 640GB is just plain more power hungry all around.

Sorry I'm just too sleepy to dig around for benchmarks or think about this any more in depth.

I don't want to go for a Green Power after reading the information about them killing themselves after time. I'm using Linux and don't want to go the hackish route by disabling the IntelliPower system through DOS.

Samsung EcoGreen or Hitachi P7K500 are the best alternatives to the WD Green drives.

Not to thread jack but...
You should tell WD why your not buying their product.

Mine works fine though, and no problems with the load cycles count. I'm running Linux myself and I've been very happy with my 1 TB Green Power (ED10EACS) so far. With AAM set to 128, it's very quiet!

@xan_user: Hey great idea, I'll write a well written and professional e-mail once I have the time.

@all too late. I made an order already. Not for the Western Digital. My current WD is pretty noisy and not that good anyway, so I went the Seagate route. All I know is that Seagate makes the best SCSI drives (from own experience, I would rather pay 100€ more for Seagate than Maxtor in SCSI HDDs! Yes Seagate SCSI is not only fast but it's silent with proper anti-vibration mounting!!!)

Also, my father's PC has a Seagate, though IDE not SATA. It's very silent, but packs up 160GB of storage space; must have costed a fortune at the time it was bought. Anyway I put an order on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB. It has 32MB cache, 2x250GB platters, 7200RPM spinning speed and 8.5ms seek time.

The Barracuda should be silent to some degree, anyone have hands-on experience? SPCR have reviewed the 1TB version of the new Barracuda, which has 4x250GB platters versus just two. Also, it seems Western Digital AAKS series have only 166GB per platter (all info based on what I found on Google)

So the 500GB Barracuda should be a big deal quieter than the 1TB version. Am I right? Did I even make a good decision placing an order on it? Thanks in advance!

Sorry but Seagate doesn't make quiet HDDs anymore. You should have done a little more research before ordering that 7200.11.. Sorry.

You didn't google very well. The old WD Green Powers had 250GB platters. Current WD 3.5" drives have 320 or 333GB platters. The same with Samsung F1 drives. The 500GB/platter drives are coming soon.

Of course there are older drives still on the market, just don't buy those.

I did do a lot of research and all reviews I read said that the Barracuda 7200.11 is going back to the right route regarding silence. Sure it doesn't have AAM, but hey I'm not underclocking my CPU either (as in sure I want silence, but not at the cost of performance).

I will get a Nexus DiskTwin for the drive, let's see how quiet it is