Silent HDD

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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traceracute
Posts: 13
Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2016 9:43 pm

Silent HDD

Post by traceracute » Wed Dec 21, 2016 10:05 pm

Hello.

Sorry if I get tangential.

I have a BitFenix Prodigy which does a pretty bad job of suppressing noise. I just put a 3 year old WD Black 1TB HDD in my PC after years of just having an SSD. I still have my 500GB 850 EVO in there, but need space for other things like music.

I put some older video games on my HDD to save space. I ended up putting some pretty old games on there. Games that don't require much to run them in other words. The problem is for some reason my game not only seems a bit slow but my HDD gets increasingly louder over time. I checked Crystaldisk and it's a healthy drive. It's only 3 years old and I don't think there's an actual issue with the drive.

I just think it's a combination of my case not doing a good job of suppressing noise and the fact that WD Black drives are loud. I guess it's something I haven't noticed before. My question is, is there any drive out there I could get or any way I could make my current drive quieter? I'm looking for something around $50-$75 and 1TB in space.

My SSD also boots a bit slower now and generally things seem a bit slower, not sure why if anyone could answer that.

Thanks for any feedback.

HFat
Posts: 1753
Joined: Thu Jul 03, 2008 4:27 am
Location: Switzerland

Re: Silent HDD

Post by HFat » Mon Dec 26, 2016 3:36 am

There probably are pretty quiet 3.5'' drives nowadays and there are ways to lower the noise of your existing drive (see other threads in this forum) but I wouldn't bother looking for reviews and such if you only need 1T. Just get a 5400rpm (or thereabouts) 2.5'' drive. Hitachis are the ones I have most experience with but they should all be quiet now, even used ones as long as they are in good condition and only a few years old.
If you were to buy a new drive, you could use your old one for backups. You might already be up to speed on that but if not, backups could save you lot of time and grief... a lot more than minor performance issues.

As to your SSD, there are reasons why performance might drop, especially with many (most?) consumer drives. But if the effect isn't easily quantifiable (you wrote "seem") it's probably not worth trying to fix such a non-issue. If there actually is a serious and quantifiable problem, maybe post the details.
You'll be able to get a cheap replacement before too long anyway. If you really want performance consistency over time, maybe look for entreprise-type drives on the used market (you can get them pretty cheap if you're patient or lucky). But I think it'd be overkill.

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