SPCR

Im building a dedicated HTPC and i was stupid enough to choose a Samsung Spinpoint 250GB SATA drive because i heard they were generally pretty silent. However, this drive sounds pretty much like a pretty loud fan even when not doing anything(i have stopped all fans in the system, and its definetly the HD ). Ive tried putting it outside the case on some antistatic wrapping/bubblewrap etc, which prevents vibrations, but its still very noticeable anywhere in the room. It also vibrates alot, and i *am* going to suspend it in some elastics or something, but even so im very worried about this fan like noise.

Ive read the related posts on this, and people seems to be saying that the nidec motor is the most silent. However, my drive has a nidec motor, and its most definitely NOT silent.

Is there any software means of putting the drive in to a silent mode or any such thing? Does activating/de-activating S.M.A.R.Tor running a SMART monitoring program cause the drive to make more noise?( i have Speedfan starting on startup, to control fan speed, but it also monitors SMART on the drive).

Perhaps some running in might help things a little?

Realise than no 3.5" is really all that quiet, in a quiet system they will always be louder than the fans. The airborne noise is difficult to handle. Suspending it will help, but don't have unrealistic expectations. It will always be about twice as loud as 2 or even 3 slow 120mm fans (my uneducated guess).

"Realise than no 3.5" is really all that quiet, in a quiet system they will always be louder than the fans. "

I guess i never realised that HD's made this much noise. My system currently has a 12db Pabst 80mm fan(PSU), and a 19db pabst 80mm fan(on Sonic Tower fanless heatsink). With them turned to a low level the HD is horrible to listen to. Ive gone and bought 2x9db 92mm SilenX fans to replace the pabst fans. These new fans are incredibly silent. At 20-30 cm they are actually quite loud, giving some weird whup-whup noise, but they are *completely* inaudible farther away. I dont know if the 9db rating is realistic, but they definetly are more quiet than a 12db pabst fan. But that just makes it really sad if the HD is going to make alot of noise

Perhaps some running in might help things a little?

Thanks a lot for that link, i did a forum search on spinpoint, not on P120, so i hadnt seen that one.
I hope running in will help. But i also noticed the mention of Hitachi Tools to slow down the drive? Does these Hitachi tools really work with Samsung drives and where can one find them?

You can download the Hitachi DiskTool from their web site

Note that the acoustic management it turns on and adjusts only affects seek noise, not spin (idle) noise. BTW, you may have an unusually bad drive and should try to exchange it for another.

mg1394 wrote: Note that the acoustic management it turns on and adjusts only affects seek noise, not spin (idle) noise. BTW, you may have an unusually bad drive and should try to exchange it for another.

I found it and tried it on my other PC. It has a Hitachi and a Seagate drive. On the hitachi drive i was also able to adjust some power management stuff which seemed amongst other to concern the standby RPM's of the drive which should affect idle noise i suppose? However, i cant set that on the (old) seagate drive, so will i be able to set that on the Samsung drive?

Hmm. When run on my HTPC the Hitachi tool crashes when scannning the BUS

Does Samsung have a similar util? Ive found a program called HUTIL, but from the documentation it can only set aam.

Suspend the drive so long, generally it helps to remove low frequency noise. A good test is to put your ear against the side panel and see if you can hear low frequency noise (hum). If the drive is nicely isolated, you won't hear much at all.

When run on my HTPC the Hitachi tool crashes when scannning the BUS

Put the drive in a friend's PC.

vertigo wrote: Put the drive in a friend's PC.

Thats a good idea, but it would be nice to know whether or not anything besides aam was supported on Samsung drives, since otherwise i might as well use the Samsung utility.

vertigo wrote:Suspend the drive so long, generally it helps to remove low frequency noise.

Sorry, what do you mean by "suspend"? Are you refering to having windows turn of the the harddisks after a while of inactivity ? Does this actually work well, or can it cause problems in regards to what windows considers inactive?

No, he means literally suspending the hard drive in space using elastic (but not too stretchy elastic). That or mounting it on foam rubber on the case floor.

Denorios wrote:No, he means literally suspending the hard drive in space using elastic (but not too stretchy elastic). That or mounting it on foam rubber on the case floor.

Silly me I was just thinking in the context of power management etc, ie suspend,standby, hibernate

I will definetly suspend the drive in elastics, but from what ive tried so far, that is not enough. It takes care of the vibrations, but the whining/fan like noise is not really affected.

but the whining/fan like noise is not really affected.

Welcome to the club.

vertigo wrote:Realise than no 3.5" is really all that quiet, in a quiet system they will always be louder than the fans. The airborne noise is difficult to handle. Suspending it will help, but don't have unrealistic expectations. It will always be about twice as loud as 2 or even 3 slow 120mm fans (my uneducated guess).

I suppose we all have different experiences, but my HDDs are quieter than any of my 120mm Nexus fans when compared one on one.

There is a lot of luck when it comes to getting quiet drives and fans. Just buying a good make is unfortunately not always enough (as so many of us have found out)

I suppose we all have different experiences, but my HDDs are quieter than any of my 120mm Nexus fans when compared one on one.

I meant a Nexus @7v with no grille turbulence. My Maxtor DMP10 is more than 3x that volume. It's twice the sound of my two nexus's, and the one in the power supply is louder.

eh. you have a crap drive. return it quick.

I think its hard to compare noise between fans and harddrives, but my problem is that the fans can be adjusted in voltage using speedfan until they are completely inaudible, while the HD just keeps making a noticeable noise all the time. Im surprised it doesnt spin down when not in use. I think i will try the hitachi tools on another machine, set aam to the quietest possible and then see if i can set the standby/idle RPM in any way. If not, then i guess ill try using the BIOS options or windows power management for turning off the HD when idle.

Afaik there is no "idle RPM" on this drive, its either on or not spinning. I know of only drive that has lower-RPM idle.

vertigo wrote:

I suppose we all have different experiences, but my HDDs are quieter than any of my 120mm Nexus fans when compared one on one.

I meant a Nexus @7v with no grille turbulence. My Maxtor DMP10 is more than 3x that volume. It's twice the sound of my two nexus's, and the one in the power supply is louder.

Maybe I have good drives, but bad fans

At 20cm and with the Nexus 120mm fan at 7V they are louder than either of my drives All 3 of the fans are the same, and they were bought at different times.

Some of it is just luck. The good news is that they are all inaudible from where I sit

At 20cm and with the Nexus 120mm fan at 7V they are louder than either of my drives All 3 of the fans are the same, and they were bought at different times.

Oh well, perhaps I have a loud one. I can hardly return it because it's too loud.

Oh well, perhaps I have a loud one. I can hardly return it because it's too loud

From Samsung's website:
"Each of the four new Samsung SpinPoint 120 Series Serial ATA and Parallel ATA hard drives feature 100GB/125GB formatted capacity per disk, high-speed dual digital signal processor (DSP), ATA S.M.A.R.T. compliance, ATA Automatic Acoustic Management and ATA Streaming. All are equipped with a 7200-rpm spindle speed, and 8.9-millisecond average seek time and a 8MB cache buffer. Samsung offers the quietest drives in the industry that utilize its patented NoiseGuard™ and SilentSeek™ next generation technology."

It doesn't sound like you are getting what they are commercially offering. Take it back.

ozdoc wrote: Samsung offers the quietest drives in the industry that utilize its patented NoiseGuard™ and SilentSeek™ next generation technology."

It doesn't sound like you are getting what they are commercially offering. Take it back.

I think ill try writing Samsungs support, maybe some of these fancy features have to be enabled by means of some program. If that fails, ill try to take it back.

Well in my BQE the drive does provide some hum still, I would need to cut away the drive cage entirely and suspend the drive from above. That way, the horizontal vibrations wouldn't transfer to the case (because of the vertical distance from the mount and the ability to pivot).

As it is, I am using grommets fashioned from foam ear plugs. As good as they are, they can't get rid of all the hum. The hum is really soft, but it adds to the noise.

Probably with all hum gone the drive would only be about twice the noise of the Nexus @ 7v. The Nexus @7v is really quiet, inaudible at half a meter. I could also dampen the case, which I haven't done.

Okay, now ive had a chance to compare side-by-side to a Seagate .7 HD in another system, and both HDs were equally noisy, but the SP vibrated much more powerfully even in quiet aam mode.

I guess i just never before had a chance to listen to a HD with really silent fans before. The HDs match an old Pabst 12db fan running at 12V in noise. That might not sound like much, but its enough to be noticeable i a quiet room, and the rest of the system is now practically silent.

Im going to elasticly suspend the HD to kill the vibration. In order to help with the fan-like noise, im hoping to utilize either the BIOS or windows options for turning off the HDs when they are not in use. Does anyone here have experience with that?

Most people do not have that much success in turning off HDDs when they are not in use.

You are better off either:
a) return the drive and hope for a better one
b) buy a decent enclosure to put the drive in

There is a new(ish) enclosure out that is meant to be a lot better than the SilentMax ones that I have. I do not come here that often and cannot remember which one it is...good job or I'd buy it

Enclosures make a great deal of difference to a general whoosh noise, reasonable difference to whine and seek noise. They make no difference to vibration issues unless you get lucky. Being in an enclosure the mass that vibrates is bigger and sometimes just moves beyond the resonant frequency of a drive...if you are lucky.

I wish someone would come up with a way of silencing 3.5" drives, at the moment I don't think any enclosures or suspension methods do a good enough job.

I bought a couple of 250Gb Spinpoints for my main system, but I could easily hear them running 4-5m away and sitting within 1m of them the noise was really annoying. 2 rubber grommet mounted Spinpoints were easily several times as loud as 4 low speed fans. Even with a single drive suspended and damped, or put in a Nexus enclosure, it was still easily louder than my fans.

The only solution I could see was to stick the 250Gb drives in an older PC running in another room, then put a single platter 2.5" drive in my main system. That gave me a much quieter system, but obviously a 5400RPM drive + networked storage isn't as fast as the Spinpoints would be.

I think Mike C has to do another review.

get a couple of them or something?

luminous wrote:Most people do not have that much success in turning off HDDs when they are not in use.

Why not, it seems a simple enough operation? Is it due to programs logging data to file etc? I assume it will only turn off when no programs are writing to the HD I suppose i would need to turn off SMART and then chase down any programs that were logging to a file. Are there any utilities for playing around with this, so you dont have to sit and wait for the HD to turn off?

luminous wrote: You are better off either:
a) return the drive and hope for a better one
b) buy a decent enclosure to put the drive in

Enclosures make a great deal of difference to a general whoosh noise, reasonable difference to whine and seek noise. They make no difference to vibration issues unless you get lucky.

I dont think exchanging the drive will make a difference, as i said, ive compared it side-by-side to a few other HD's, and they all make a whoosing sound.

As to b., i really need to get rid of both kinds of noise, so i suppose i should use a suspended enclosure I do have some noise dampening stuff for the computer cases, maybe a tactical deployment of that stuff will help take some of the whoosh out of it.

There was a good topic on stopping your HDD within windows a few months back. I do not come here often enough to remember exactly what is was called, sorry.

Basically windows ends up trying to write something to the drive that wakes it up, again and again and again. If you really want to fiddle with this, you can go into power management options and set the drives to power down after 5 mins of none use.

There is one of the HDD temp monitoring programs that allows you to power down a HDD (it never worked for me). The issue with a powered down HDD is that is takes ages to come back on line when you need it. Useless if you are playing games (they power down when you need them), and they never powered off in windows.


Suspended enclosures are the way forward for 3.5 drives...tis what I use