True, but you raised photo/audio editing to be in general not HDD intensive. Who knows maybe Thomas is a club DJ who owns his own label or is a professional photographer with 100MB+ photos to edit? It can be anything in between, but please don't put up photo/audio editing as something simple. We're still friends though <3
















Got you!

Can you gave an example of something simple then?

Sorry for being pedantic and thanks for replying.

Yeah, there must be faster drives, than the F2 - but I think the speed gained aint THAT big, and compared to that little gain, the noise/price cost seems too high.

One thing is sure, the F2 will be quite a lot faster than my current 2,5" Hitachi'es

Ask any teenager nowadays what they do with their PC

For example, transfer music to MP3 player via iTunes or similar, generating an image gallery with Picasa (possibly applying a few retouching filters to some images as well), use Windows Movie Maker to capture short video from webcam and add annotations et cetera then upload to YouTube.

There are lots of other applications and simple tasks people do with their home computers, for example: spreadsheet / document editing, reading e-books, watch TV / movies, listen to music, surfing the Web

In all these examples, no matter how big music library you have et cetera, HDD is not taxed enough to call it the bottleneck in the process. Look, audio editing can go from something as simple as making a few cuts and fade ins/outs with Audacity, but this is not as likely as using the PC to mix multiple audio sources together or go as far as to produce a track, because nowadays a PC is powerful enough to do basically anything, you name it, so it entices more and more people to do stuff that only "rich" people could do a few years back.

When talking about "everyday use" people often think about something as simple as listening to music. Now you can go and say that listening to music can be demanding as well and you are correct. I for example have Dolby Digital surround music ripped from DVD-Audio discs. While playing back these music files, the CPU gets taxed much more than when playing back PCM audio. My CPU is not by any means a high end CPU, but even when playing back these exclusive files the CPU is not taxed enough to make audible errors in the playback process. I also have full recordings of radio streams with some files going up as large as 5GB in size. Still, playing these files back doesn't really tax the CPU or HDD much to have any errors in the playback process. My files are special type of files though and I do think that my activities are practised only by a very small minority. Having that said and actually thinking more about what a typical user means with "listen to music", I get the image of someone playing back hundreds of small MP3 files with their favorite media player. You could do this few years back as well, PC technology again has advanced that much that the activities we do with our PCs don't tend to tax any resources enough to produce visual or audible errors (such as slow application response or skipping in the audio file).

Having this said and if you still think that audio/photo editing is something simple, then go ask someone who looks like a typical PC user. Sometimes they might surprise you as I know someone who doesn't really look like an audiophile (judging by his Hi-Fi gear in his house ) but who also records radio for long hours. What he does with Audacity is starting to be demanding though. Imagine a 2GB+ file in Audacity and you need to split it into multiple hundreds of small tracks. It's time consuming, but also pushes the RAM very easily to the max.

Sorry for long post

Thanks

MikeC, on page2 of article and Drive Noise Test Summary table on page3, it says HD502HL. It should be I. Unless there is another model, this might cause confusion to those who end up here via a search.


This is heartening. Perhaps with an F2 Ecogreen as a system drive and the WD640AAKS as a storage/offline drive, I would minimise noise and still make the most of what storage I currently have. A couple of milliseconds difference would be difficult to notice.

After reading the article, what struck me was how things can so quickly change in the market. With people going on about SSDs and so forth, it seemed like desktop 3.5" was getting tired and "old school". But then this. Of course there will be those early adopters who will want to be at the forefront and go straight for SSD. But the HD502HI is golden for the budget silencer. It does just about everything right -- except being widely available at this time.

It almost makes the 2.5" 5400 (even 7200) market redundant for desktop use. Unless you really wanted to go to the extremes of comparing ~3W to 1W idle and possibly a few degrees in temperatures.

Considering then IS the Silent PC Future 2.5-inches wide?, should it now be revised, or rethought, to take into account this burgeoning market and resurgence of 3.5" 5400RPM?

Sure, it hasn't reached your desired sub-10dBA as you state in that article, but 12dBA for HDD sounds (pun un/intended) good enough (at least for now) !


I think the difference between when home users like myself "use Photoshop" and when professionals really do use Photoshop can be summed up in those system spec's.

Those sorts of things will be limited by CPU speed and available memory. Ripping CDs is down to the optical drive and CPU. Image gallery generation is CPU for loading/decoding/resizing. Movie Maker will be more down to the speed of the link (USB/Firewire/card reader) and CPU for transcoding. Youtube is limited by internet connection upload speed.



None of those will be appreciably slower with a 5400 RPM HDD, as long as you have a reasonable amount of RAM.

Basically, none of the things most people do every day will be much slower due to the HDD. Most people are not professional photographers or video editors.

As I said before, if you find a laptop acceptable then this HDD will be fine for you, as most laptops use 5400 RPM HDDs.

You got it

I've stopped thinking about HDD performance that much, but do care about it as I produce music and need the extra performance with a fast HDD. For any other build however I could slap in a 5400RPM EcoGreen or GreenPower drive with confidence (think family PC, HTPC, etcetera).

To put it simply, "everyday use" will not suffer from a slower HDD.

My bottom line thoughts on this --

1) (a slower drive doesn't matter much for the typical desktop users, AND
2) the Samsung HD502HI is NOT slow, it should keep up with any 7200rpm drive that is even remotely close in acoustics. (At least until 7200s get to 500gb/platter density.)

In other worlds for the typical desktop user any current HDD will suffice, meaning the only thing to worry about is acoustics!

regarding the short stroking vs acess times I found this thread
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/for ... 5003457931

with this image

The concept here is the gap in access time between AAM modes is higher if you use the full drive. Short stroking will reduce the access times and the more you short stroke the more it helps.

If seek noise doesn't bother you you'll see better performance improvement by changing the AAM setting than you will by short stroking.

Doing both will help, doing one without the other will help as well.

I just bought this drive and threw it in my Tivo. It is plenty fast for this job and is much quieter than the 4 year old 7200rpm Samsung it replaced. Not much room to do suspending in a Tivo, but I was able to decouple it some. I can probably tweak it a bit more, but really it's damn good as it is.

fwiw I just tested this drive on a Dell Optiplex 740. The 740 and most other dell PCs have a BIOS setting that appears to set AAM. The options are

Quiet 15.3ms
Suggested 15.3ms
Performance 15.2ms

I didn't bother testing "bypass" because the BIOS description makes me assume it will be the same as "suggested".

These tests were done with the drive not being used by the system. I.e. there was no data, it wasn't the boot drive, nothing was accessing the drive other than HDTune during the testing. I'm not sure if the SPCR article tested it only as a boot drive or if they did testing of the drive without any load on it.

Also the testing may be less accurate than the true change in performance as I used HD Tune 2.55 (free version) with the benchmark slider in the middle position between fast and accurate and left the block size at 64 KB. Maybe if I moved it to accurate there might be a slight difference in those readings.

The description in the bios for each setting was

Bypass = do nothing (needed for older drives)
Quiet = slower, but quieter
Suggested = Allow drive manufacturer to select mode
Performance = Faster, but possibly noisier

For the record I set all the machines to Performance and have never noticed a problem with noise on modern hard drives in an office setting.

Oh, I also did an error scan in HD Tune with the drive sitting in open air on top of my desk. This gives me a chance to listen to the drive and watch the temp rise due to activity. I did the same with a WD Black 640GB WD6401AALS some time back and had to put a small desk fan pointed at it to prevent it from heating up more than I was comfortable with. The Samsung is idling at 29c in open air and during the error scan it never left the low 30s so I didn't bother with a fan. Just another way of saying it doesn't draw much power.

On page 3, in the noise test comparison table, the power consumption numbers for the Velociraptor seem to be wrong and appear to be a copy of the numbers for the 3.5" Raptor at the bottom of the table. From your test here they should be 3.9W, 5.7W and 6.2W:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article844-page4.html

Where did you get an F2 in Vancouver? They don't seem to be carried by NCIX or Anitec.

I see that NCIX has their 1.5 TB Ecogreen F2's on sale this weekend for $99:

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=45370 ... re=Samsung

Does anyone know if the 1.5 TB model is just as quiet as the 500GB model in the review?

Thanks.

definitely not. the 500gb is a 1-platter design. The 1.5gb is 3-4 platters.