Storage

It is a portable optical disk writer barely bigger than two standard CD clamshell cases and weighing under a pound. The small size and weight is perfectly enhanced by its power requirements: It needs no wall-wart for AC power, because its USB cable draws power for the unit from the PC that it's connected to. Brilliant and obvious.

Western Digital has a new color code to identify different classes of drives in its lineup. This 320GB/platter, 2-platter 640GB is now in team Blue, between Black and Green. The single-platter 320GB model had casing variants which made it either very quiet or not so quiet. What about the Caviar Blue 640?

It's an unusual product in every way: A 10,000rpm SATA drive in an enterprise 2.5" form factor mated to a cast aluminum heatsink with a 3.5" desktop HDD form factor. WD's Velociraptor actually manages to win three crowns at SPCR: Performance, Green and Acoustics... but for the last crown, not the way it's delivered to the retail buyer.

Samsung F1s are the top performing 7200RPM desktop drives of the day. We put the 750G and 1TB models through their paces in SPCR's acoustics chamber to find out whether they can take the low noise crown.

WD's new 320GB/platter Caviar SE16 desktop hard drives have been creating some excitement. They are high performance by virtue of their high areal density, the OC websites have reported. With the low number of spinning platters, they should also be very quiet, a quality WD have been focused on for a couple of years now. We took the 320GB single-platter model out for a spin in our acoustics lab. It turned into a long and winding road.

Our enthusiasm for the low noise WD 750GB Green Power hard drive prompted us to go hunting for the 1 TB flagship model so we could do more than speculate about it. With Western Digital's odd IntelliPower system for rating spindle speed, we wanted to confirm for ourselves that it shared all the characteristics of its smaller brother — noise, power and all.

Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 shows signs of significant changes, and it is claimed to be quieter, less power hungry, and faster than previous versions. And it is. But how much quieter?

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 was the first terabyte drive to market, and it remains one of the fastest drives money can buy, competitive with the legendary WD Raptor. Historically, Hitachi drives have been on the noisy side, but the 7K1000 brings incremental improvements and a low RPM idle mode that no other drives in the industry offer.

Western Digital has been on our watch list since they sent us their (then) flagship 500 GB drive with seeks that we could hardly hear. This is the WD first drive sample that we've seen since, and it's unusual: Their PR says it's Green, low power, and very quiet. We confirm that it spins at 5,400 RPM using frequency spectrum analysis; WD's code for this speed is "IntelliPower". Does lower rotation speed mean lower noise? You betcha!

Seagate is one of three manufacturers now making 7,200 RPM Notebook drives. Their Momentus 7200.1 was an acoustic disappointment, but it's been updated with Perpendicular recording and fall detection in the 7200.2. Did the improvements extend to the acoustics?

The MX-1 is Antec's first external hard drive enclosure. They pointedly call it an Actively Cooled Hard Drive Enclosure. It includes a fan, one quiet enough that Antec says it measures less than 22 dBA@1m. That's quieter than most hard drives. It's made mostly of plastic, but Antec also claims it keeps the drive very cool. Those are pretty good reasons for us to be interested

Seagate's Mirra Personal Server is designed to prevent the loss of data from the hard drives in your network. It is an automated backup system. Its acoustics are not ideal for hanging on the wall... or anywhere exposed, for that matter.

eSATA drive enclosures are potentially useful for silencers because they allow the boot drive to be placed remotely for the ultimate in acoustic isolation. Icy Dock makes nothing but hard drive enclosures, and they have one of the first eSATA enclosures on the market, a most stylish device some people wouldn't want to hide.

Samsung has a long history of producing quiet drives, and we expect the Spinpoint T Series to continue that legacy. The capacity can't quite match the 500 GB and 750 GB drives on the market, but the real question will be whether it can match Western Digital's recent drives for noise.

Western Digital has done little to promote their line of notebook drives, and with the flagship drive coming in at just 120 GB, it's not hard to see why. Rated according to the usual slew of benchmarks and performance tests, this Scorpio is not particularly noteworthy. But, SPCR doesn't run the usual slew of benchmarks and performance tests; we are interested in noise. Is the Scorpio quiet enough to earn our approval?