Seagate 500GB Seagate Barracuda 16MB 7200.10

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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LBadvance
Posts: 177
Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 7:35 pm

Seagate 500GB Seagate Barracuda 16MB 7200.10

Post by LBadvance » Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:23 pm

Are the PATA version of the Seagate 7200.10 500GB noisy? Or what other 500GB PATA HDD should I be looking at?

Ihmemies
Posts: 43
Joined: Sun Aug 28, 2005 9:30 am
Location: Finland
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Post by Ihmemies » Tue Feb 13, 2007 3:32 am

Seagate doesn't support AAM (feature to make seek noises more silent - and slower), also my newer Seagate disks (after 7200.7 series) aren't very quiet, and wouldn't recommend them to anyone here.

whiic
Posts: 575
Joined: Wed Sep 06, 2006 11:48 pm
Location: Finland

Post by whiic » Tue Feb 13, 2007 4:01 am

Some manufacturers prefer selling high-capacity drive only in SATA. Samsung doesn't have 500GB PATA variant listed on their web pages and I cannot confirm whether it's the same with WD (because for some reason WDC home pages seem to be unreachable to me at the moment) but googling for "WD5000JB" doesn't bring long list of retailers.

...Nande kuso?! WDC and Seagate home pages were actually blocked by Peer Guardian?! (Not blocked any longer...)
Anyway, now I confirmed there's not 500GB listed on WD web site.

So, your options are probably:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB (3 platters) (8 & 16MB cache)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB (4 platters) (8 & 16MB cache) (discontinued)
Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 500GB (3 platters) (8MB cache)
Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 500GB (5 platters) (8MB cache)

@750GB+:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB (4 platters) (8 & 16MB cache)
Hitachi Deskstar T7K1000 750GB & 1000GB (5 platters) (16MB(?) cache)

(?)= there's some uncertainty what cache will PATA variant have. Web pages claim 32MB to SATA and 8MB to PATA but datasheets claim 32MB & 16MB.

And if you could consider 400GB enough you had the possibility to use Samsung Spinpoint T133 400GB (as T166 series is SATA only). If not, 7200.10 or T7K500 are the only real options.

What would you use the drive for? Put it in a Toppy?

LBadvance
Posts: 177
Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 7:35 pm

Post by LBadvance » Tue Feb 13, 2007 4:31 pm

The new 500GB HDD is going to be shared with its brothers 1.) 80GB 7200.8 the best drive in terms of heat/vibration/noise/price ever. 2.) 2x 300GB 7200.9.

So if i add in the 500GB 7200.10 will the 7200.9 be noiser than the 7200.10 that I wont hear a difference?

The drives are in the Sonata stock drive cage, and the whole case has Acoustipak installed.

As for going a smaller size, space is running out I would rather have a larger drive i can afford now.

If i were to go for a SATA drive, should i be looking at the Samsungs? My experience with SATA drives are they are much noiser than their PATA counterparts. Samsung also ask for a higher premium where i live and are much rarer than Seagates, so I have to keep that in mind as well.



Another question, how do people install HDD in the 5.25" slots WITHOUT using elastic bands and yet still helps in decouping the drive?

Thanks

whiic
Posts: 575
Joined: Wed Sep 06, 2006 11:48 pm
Location: Finland

Post by whiic » Wed Feb 14, 2007 1:58 am

"The new 500GB HDD is going to be shared with its brothers 1.) 80GB 7200.8 the best drive in terms of heat/vibration/noise/price ever."

Yeah, those .7 and .8 generation Seagate PATAs are usually very quiet, kinda like permanently locked to AAM enabled. Of course we can't really call it AAM since end-user configurability is key requirement for any seek silencing scheme to be called AAM. And SATA drives were locked to "AAM" disabled.

I've heard newer Seagates don't have a that kind of difference between PATA and SATA any longer: you can't rely on SATAs being fast or PATAs being quiet no longer. Thus Seagate is on the bottom of the list of drives I'd recommend for quiet computers.

"So if i add in the 500GB 7200.10 will the 7200.9 be noiser than the 7200.10 that I wont hear a difference?"

Can't really tell without knowing whether your 300-giggers are noisy variant or not. If they are of the quiet variant, you might notice the seek noise of 500GB unit over the other drives.

"If i were to go for a SATA drive, should i be looking at the Samsungs?"

If you intend to add more HDDs to your case in future, buying a SATA controller card could be a solution ...considering some of the manufacturers offer higher capacities only with SATA and the fact that you already have 3 PATA drives means you don't have room for more HDDs on a typical system with at least one CD/DVD drive. Of course if you intend to ditch the 80-gigger, you can fit more big drives to your system.

To answer whether go for Samsung: it depends whether you can decouple it. If you can't, you might as well go for non-Samsung.

"My experience with SATA drives are they are much noiser than their PATA counterparts. Samsung also ask for a higher premium where i live and are much rarer than Seagates, so I have to keep that in mind as well."

Pricing varies...

Here in Finland the Samsungs are the cheapest HDDs of them all, followed by Hitachi and WD and Seagate costs the most ...though most models (except laptop drives) from Hitachi are almost impossible to obtain.

If Seagate is much cheaper than all the competition, going for Seagate isn't that bad option. You already have 3 HDDs so even buying a completely silent HDD wouldn't lower the noise output from what it is now.

"As for going a smaller size, space is running out I would rather have a larger drive i can afford now."

I have 5 drives of 250 to 400GB of capacity and since I'm slowly but surely running out of capacity, I intend to buy the next drive either at 320GB...500GB or 750GB...1TB to make obvious gap withing drives of different generations. That way, when I retire the old drives I know which drives to be retired as there'd be noticeable gap between older and newer ones. (Of course the old ones would still be perfect for infrequent back-ups.)

I still haven't decided what to do but I do have 200GB free space so I can still wait before purchasing. I guess you're out of time and cannot wait for 750-giggers to become cost-efficient? The prices will drop dramatically during the spring as Hitachi will offer an alternative to Seagate's 750-gigger.

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