Reasonably quiet SATA II drive w/ NCQ?

Interitus · Post by **Interitus** » Sat Oct 01, 2005 6:53 pm

Was going to finally take the leap to SATA and NCQ.

I have heard a lot of mixed results about the new Samsung drives so I'm not quite sure what I should replace my old Spinpoint 160GB with. I'd like something about on the same noise level as the Spinpoint if possible. Don't need a very large amount of storage, 200GB would be great.

Any recommendations?

inti · Post by **inti** » Mon Oct 03, 2005 4:01 am

Among 7200rpm drives with NCQ, in my experience Seagate 7200.8 are the quietest at idle and Maxtor Diamondmax 10 have the quietest seek. So it really depends which noise concerns you the most.

Interitus · Post by **Interitus** » Tue Oct 04, 2005 11:50 am

I'd probably prefer quiet at idle as opposed to seek noises. I think I'd have to rule out the Diamondmax 10 because I believe there are compatibility issues with my board. I remember back when my motherboard was released a lot of people were having problems with them. Maybe a few newer BIOS revisions fixed the problem, I haven't checked into it in a while but I'll look it up.

Thanks for your input

ScubaSteve · Post by **ScubaSteve** » Tue Oct 04, 2005 3:55 pm

The newest DM10's all have updated firmware, which appears to be the underlying incompatibility problem with nForce4 motherboards. Trust me, I researched this completely before installing two of them in RAID0 on my nForce3-based 'board.

The DM10 must have firmware version BANC1E00 or higher to be compatible. They are very quiet at idle, and even seeks aren't that harsh. This is coming from someone who can hear a television's high-pitched whine and finds that "loud".

FWIW, these HDD's scream.

I've never seen a faster system.

Interitus · Post by **Interitus** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 12:09 pm

That's great to hear ScubaSteve

I just remembered all the A8N-SLI Deluxe horror stories with these drives.

I'll look into the DM10's then

Although I'm not against Seagate at all either.