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Storage
Submitted by Lawrence Lee on Sun, 2009-02-15 04:20.
Storage
Seagate's Pipeline series of hard drives are aimed at DVRs, HTPCs and other devices designed to serve up media. Since performance is not critical for these types of applications, we assume that such a drive would be power efficient and quiet, two qualities that are right up our alley.
Submitted by Lawrence Lee on Sun, 2009-02-01 14:10.
Storage
On the outside, Seagate's 7200.11 1.5TB drive looks no different than the 1TB model. On the inside however, the platters are much more massive: 375GB vs. 250GB. Performance should be improved but will that be accompanied by extra noise?
Submitted by Devon Cooke on Thu, 2009-01-22 15:13.
Storage
Reaching the terabyte mark was an important symbolic step for hard drive makers
— a way of saying, "Our drives are so big, we need a new word to describe
how big they are!" But that was two years ago, and, as the drives have
aged, some problems have come to light. Both Seagate and Western Digital are
in the midst of dealing with unexpected problems in their terabyte drives. And
both have now commented publicly on the problems. And, happily, both have offered
fixes for their respective problems.
Submitted by Lawrence Lee on Tue, 2009-01-13 13:49.
Storage
The Caviar Black is Western Digital's premium 7200 RPM hard drive. The 1TB model has 3 platters and 32MB of cache putting it in direct competition with the Samsung F1 1TB drive. Which is faster, and more importantly, which is quieter?
Submitted by Mike Chin on Sat, 2008-11-15 15:50.
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.
Submitted by Mike Chin on Wed, 2008-06-18 00:04.
Storage
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?
Submitted by Mike Chin on Wed, 2008-06-11 14:53.
Storage
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.
Submitted by Mike Chin on Mon, 2008-06-09 21:14.
Storage
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.
Submitted by Mike Chin on Tue, 2008-04-08 23:13.
Storage
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.
Submitted by Mike Chin on Tue, 2008-02-26 09:01.
Storage
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.
Submitted by Devon Cooke on Tue, 2008-02-19 01:49.
Storage
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?
Submitted by Devon Cooke on Mon, 2008-01-21 01:27.
Storage
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.
Submitted by Devon Cooke on Thu, 2007-12-13 16:03.
Storage
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!
Submitted by Devon Cooke on Mon, 2007-11-12 23:28.
Storage
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?
Submitted by Mike Chin on Thu, 2007-03-29 13:41.
Storage
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 [email protected] 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
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