Of course 1TB Greenpower is quieter than 640GB Caviar Blue. The description of noise is however... unique. It's ok to be humorous when ranting about products, but if you honestly are seeking for help on a specific noise issue, you should describe it more accurately. Or possibly you were already as a...

"...that Tom review that gave me the impression that Hitachi is still plagued with slow access time..." Still? Hitachi has only become slower over time (and quieter). They used to have 12ms random access time (read). Now they're 13ms. ok. Even the latter is not bad. 7200rpm Samsung's tend to have a...

333GB/pl Ecogreen 5400rpm => F1 333GB/pl Spinpoint 7200rpm => F1 500GB/pl Ecogreen 5400rpm => F2 500GB/pl Spinpoint 7200rpm => F3 ??!?! So, they'll break the naming convention there. I wonder if next 5400rpm drive will be F4 or F3. If it's F3, with bigger than 500GB platters, the generetion code no ...

@line Reviewer at Tom's Hardware forgot to disable AAM for benchmarking 7K1000.B. Tom also has an article on effectiveness of AAM... made with 7K1000.B! During this test, AAM enabled results match results from main 7K1000.B article (around 16...17ms), where as when AAM disabled, random access time i...

Yeah, SPCR has big emphasis on noise, proper measurement distance with minimal background noise, and include subjective evaluation of noise characterics. Of course subjective is a personal view of noise profile, and varies by psychology and by sensitivity of ears, but dB(A) weighing is also based on...

It's wise to take these recommendations and anecdotal evidence as merely sample variance, prejudicial assumptions and even fanboyism... because they simply don't make that much sense. SPCR review concluded that 4-platter 2TB Greenpower is quieter than 1-platter low-rpm Seagate (Pipeline series). Now...

"I wasn't aware that Seagate and WD might be using shortstroked 4 platter design in their 1.5TB drives." It's always possible with anything less than biggest of said manufacturer's capacity point. Since WD uses 4 platters to make 2TB, they could use 4 lower capacity platters to make 1.5TB. They use...

CS ending is GP with 16MB cache. DS ending is GP with 32MB cache. As first GPs were available only as 16MB, DS is less likely to be old stock drive that has been lying around for ages. But in practice, DS has been around long enough already so pre-DS CS variants are already sold out. Thus, noisewise...

Recommended reading: http://www.silentpcreview.com/Silent_Samsung_F2_EcoGreen_HD502HI http://www.silentpcreview.com/wd-green-2tb-seagate-pipeline-500gb I don't know about 1.5TB low-power Seagate, but as 500GB got pretty much beaten by 2TB Greenpower, I really wouldn't take it strongly in considerati...

MHDD is too hardcore for plain analysis. What I use MHDD is to artificially create fake bad sectors around real bad sectors to create a "safety zone" and preventing data corruption if more bad sectors are born (as they are likely born nearby old bads). Other than creation of artificial bads, i.e doi...

"How mouch louder can I expect the dual platter to be?" Using a very scientific term: "a bit". But I guarantee, 2-platter 5400rpm drive is still pretty damn quiet. Heck, even good old 1st generation (4-platter) Greenpower beats vast majority of 1-platter 7200rpm, so if your choices are: 1-platter F...

"Wow, that's quite shocking. But perhaps that monstrous spin up power is only in the first revisions of the GP line." Perhaps. Perhaps not. Can't tell. All we can tell is that Storagereview got a hungry sample, and that if I don't remember incorrectly, a few other sites did as well. It could be lim...

Another COMPARISON ...this time a bit off-topic. Featuring all the drives measured by StorageReview with capacity of 1TB and upward. Includes 2TB Greenpower. (Unfortunately does not include any variant of F2 Ecogreen.) 5400rpm drives aren't that much behind. Especially when compared to Seagates... w...

"Then would you please direct me to where you got this "common knowledge"?" Maybe here: http://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr There's even more data in Performance Database. I selected a few drives for COMPARISON Note: during spin-up 1st generation (4-platter) Greenpower 1TB uses 28.1 watts from 12V...

robbie13: "I prefer silence to capacity. The 500GB is quieter? It is somewhat cheaper, if I'm happy with it I'll get another 0.5TB or 1TB in the future." A) Yes, 500GB is quieter. But 2x 500GB is noisier than 1x 1000GB. B) 1x 500GB may also be a couple bucks cheaper than 1x 1000GB but if you end up...

How about 1TB Samsung F2 Ecogreen, and retiring both your noisy WD and your old Seagate? Despite lower rpm, Samsungs have desktop optimized firmware and higher density platters compared to your Seagate. You'd probably get better real-life application performance from a modern 5400rpm non-Seagate tha...

Yeah. What's the cause to noise is a concern to HDD engineers. We can't fix the source, we just have to deal with it... either by decoupling / attenuation or mentally, accepting the product as it is. 5400rpm drives are (usually) quieter than 7200rpm drives. Laptop sized drives are (usually) quieter ...

"what you're hearing are the actual platters spinning @ 7200 RPM which isn't exactly slow..hence the high pitch." Bull~ 7200 round per minute = 120 round per second, thus primary frequency is as low as 120 Hz. That's subwoofer frequency, not a tweeter, not whine. Naturally there's harmonic multiple...

"And yeah, 1Tb and 1.5Tb Samsung EcoGreens are rather noisy. Higher than 1Tb I would recommend to take WD GreenPower, or Barracuda LP." I wouldn't make such generalization too quickly. I have a 1TB EcoGreen F2 and it's the quietest desktop drive I have, probably on par with some laptop drives like ...

I don't get this "idle3 can be configured only in RAID edition" rumour. RAID edition can be created of normal GreenPowers with just WDTLER application (minus warranty length - it does not increase magically if you run the tool) so how does WDIDLE3 require RAID edition? Don't they have the same firmw...

Recommended HDDs list is outdated. Some improvements I would suggest: Add : Samsung Ecogreens (F1 and F2 generations) (review also needed) Remove : - All laptop HDDs. No need to recommend 3 to 5 year old models: poor performance, very poor availability, very poor price/capacity ratio. - WD740GD. Whi...

I also find it extremely annoying that laptops have to ON/OFF cycle the CPU fan so audibly. I intend to tackle the problem by undervolting the fan with series resistor or diode(s). Optimally the fan would always spin lowly but to make it do that, I would have to add quite a bit of resistance to it, ...

WD GP #1: 557937 cycles. WD GP #2: 351112 cycles. WD GP #3: hidden thanks to nerd rage They were caused by SpeedFan, mostly, and 24/7 low-I/O fileserving. A horrible environment to use them in, NOT comparable to idling XP. Then I reconfigured SpeedFan and the unload rate has divided to a small fract...

I undervolt during summers. Not that I'm running my Q6600 G0 too hot but to save electricity. Summer: 2.4 GHz (max), 1.6 GHz (typical), 1.1 vcore (constant, as it's lowest mobo can give). Vdroop modded to increase voltage stability. (Not good for undervoltability during summer.) Winter: 3.2 GHz (max...

Could you be more vague, please? WD SATA hard drive? GreenPower (5400rpm)? Or Caviar (Blue or Black)(7200rpm)? Raptor or Velociraptor (10000rpm)? Modern HDDs? Or bought 3 years ago? There's several methods of spinning HDD down. Method #1: STAND-BY / STAND-BY IMMEDIATE command: when issued HDD will s...

And about Task Manager IO reading (read, read bytes, write, write bytes, other, other bytes), they appear to be about read/write IO in general. So it includes not only HDD IO but also RAM IO. I too my laptop on my lap while writing this stuff on my desktop. I'm making these observations for laptops ...

m0002a: "Not to mention using half-truths to make the weaker argument appear the better." Half-truths are still better than complete BS like "Windows does not accumulate high numbers of load/unloads because it writes to the drives very frequently, even when "idle."" Get that Filemon logging already...

m0002a: "So yes, I would expect WD to disclose if there are problems using GP drives with Linux." Like I already said, the same "issue" is present in all laptop HDDs (minus a few low-volume laptop drives intended specifically for Blade servers, that have the unload feature disabled at factory). The...

josh-j : "Anyway, sorry if I annoyed you." You didn't annoy me. It was just the whole unload topic, and people who contribute on spreading FUD without giving their suspicions a proper thought. You know, the people who say: "This is the worst product ever. I will never buy from them again! The betra...

"The bottom line is that Windows writes to the drive more than Linux even when both are idle. It is possible to disable indexing, but very few people do that (and besides, it is not just indexing that causes the frequent disk writes in Windows in my experience), and that is why the WD Green Drives ...