Comparison of various WD Caviar drives?

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Panamon
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Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:24 am

Comparison of various WD Caviar drives?

Post by Panamon » Fri Mar 02, 2007 6:52 pm

I've done some looking around on these forums, and I've come across numerous comparisons of one or two WD drives to another, or to other brands. But what I'm really curious about is whether there are any major differences between the various manifestations of the Caviar SE. There seem to be at least half a dozen of them now, plus the other related Caviar drives.

I can find performance specs on quite a few other sites, so I'm not asking about that. What I'm curious about is what the differences are, if any, purely in terms of acoustics. There's quite a lot of experience and expertise here, so I thought I'd ask.

The SE16 WD5000KS seems to be one of the top drives currently on the market in terms of noise (it's right there on the recommended list), and I've read similar things about the AAKS version on these forums. I've read scattered opinions about other WD drives. I guess I might be being a little selfish, but what I'm really hoping for (in my ideal world) would be some sort of comparison between the many different WD drives, primarily the Caviar line. I'd like to get some solid performance, and they all tend to be solid performers, but how do they compare to one another sound wise?

Hope that's not too demanding of me. It might be possible to piece together something similar by reading through a whole mess of forum posts and working out the subjective comparisons of different people here, but as a student I just don't have that kind of time atm. Thanks in advance for whatever response I get, I'm sure it'll be informative in one way or another.

whiic
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Post by whiic » Sat Mar 03, 2007 3:08 am

"I guess I might be being a little selfish, but what I'm really hoping for (in my ideal world) would be some sort of comparison between the many different WD drives, primarily the Caviar line. I'd like to get some solid performance, and they all tend to be solid performers, but how do they compare to one another sound wise?"

I don't think it'd be worth the trouble. Reviewing all capacity points of Caviar is a tremendous task which would postpone other several other, smaller but at least equally important reviews. I mean that reviewing all Caviars would be "nice" but using the same amount of time/money for reviewing a wider range of drives would probably serve the enthusiast community better.

One reason why all-Caviar-round-up would be too tremendous a project is because there's so many variants of each capacity point. And I don't mean just JB, KS, YS, BB, etc. but physical variants: noisy and quiet. For example there's noisy KSes and quiet KSes, and there's noisy JBs and quiet JBs. Is there a reason to review (for example) noisy WD3200KS vs noisy WD3200JB or quiet WD3200KS vs quiet WD3200JB? I don't think there is. The difference is between these two is amount of cache which by itself doesn't much affect noise produced. (Though bigger cache reduces number of seeks and ideally makes the drive a bit more quiet. This should apply to noisy and quiet batches.)

Anyway, your correct in your assumption that there's at least half a dozen variants which are different noisewise. If you include cache-variants etc. it'd be a whole dozen or two. It's pointless to review them all, but it's hard to find all the noisy and quiet variants when they are named in similar fashion. Real differences may be attributed to manufacturing dates, firmware, product code suffixes (example: WD3200JB-00KFA0), etc. You don't see them listed at retailers so even if such an extensive review was made, you couldn't benefit from the information obtained.

But in an ideal dreamworld with infinite resources, such a review would be made. In that ideal dreamworld retailers would also list each different firmware at their product list, etc. And in ideal world WD wouldn't manufacture both noisy and quiet drives under the same name.

vincentfox
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Post by vincentfox » Sat Mar 03, 2007 10:36 am

In general, the version of a drive with fewer platters is a bit quieter. I went with the SE16 250-gig version and in the suspension mounts of my Antec Solo it's the quietest drive I've yet owned. Specifically it's a WD2500KS-00MJB0.

To agree with previous poster, doing all the micro-reviews within a product line would be prohibitive in money & man-hours. Are you, or the manufacturer, going to send a sample of every drive variant to a reviewer?

Panamon
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Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:24 am

Post by Panamon » Sat Mar 03, 2007 2:50 pm

Actually, I was just hoping for something a little more realistic. I've come across comparisons in these forums of the majority of the WD drives to drives of other brands, and even more rarely to one another. I realize doing an actual review of them all would be, well, basically pointless. And far more effort than it'd be worth.

I was just hoping to get personal, subjective comparisons of the drives, specifically to one another, all in the same place. Like I said above, it seems probable that I could piece together such a list of comparisons if I trolled through the many, many, many pages of the Silent Storage section, it would just require about a million seperate comparisons. (Like those math problems you used to get on annoying tests: if Mary has more apples than John, and John has more than Pete, and Mary has less than Joe, and... etc, etc.)

I'd also gathered from reading through all the official reviews and the recommended lists that various firmware versions tend to change things, but since that's basically an almost totally uncontrollable factor I'm personally going to just ignore it when I get around to buying a drive (after I manage to make up my mind about which one to go with). Especially as seeing how, shopping online, pretty much nobody is going to tell me what version a given drive is anyway.

With the huge wealth of experience residing on these forums, I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. There are tons of threads asking for comparisons of one drive to another, I just haven't seen any making the particular comparison I'm interested in. That was really all I was asking for, which is why I never actually asked for a review in my original post, or even used the word.

vincentfox
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Post by vincentfox » Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:18 pm

I'd recommend check the database over at StorageReview.com. They have a comparator thingy, don't know if it has all the WD drives you want, but it'll probably come the closest.

whiic
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Post by whiic » Sun Mar 04, 2007 2:41 am

"I'd recommend check the database over at StorageReview.com."

SR's performance database is mainly for performance comparisons. Objective noise measuments may not be what we want as even SR acknowledges even weighted dBA measurements doesn't always give a good picture of perceivable noise.

For example WD's 250-gigger was the noisiest (in terms of dBA) of all drives reviewed in the 250GB round-up, but they included a subjective evaluation in the review as well: "Subjectively speaking, however, the WD2500KS's idle noise is hardly something worth sounding an alarm over." ( http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/250_7.html )

and on conclusions page ( http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/250_9.html ): "The drive's idle noise floor is not nearly as loud as objective measurements may suggest."

One more reason why not to trust SR's noise measurements: "Previously, we settled on a distance of 18 millimeters, one close enough to negate most ambient noise. Four years ago, Seagate's Barracuda ATA IV was the end-all in quiet drives. The proliferation of fluid dynamic bearing motors and heightened attention to acoustic design in general, however, have combined to significantly reduce the average noise level of today's hard drive. Further, with Testbed4 poised to evaluate notebook drives, the mean noise level of test drives will drop even further. To deliver meaningful differentiation in measured idle noise, we've reduced the distance between the microphone and the drive to 3 millimeters." ( http://www.storagereview.com/articles/2 ... ed4_7.html )

3 millimeters! Are you going to listen to your drive that close? If you make measurements, the measurement result is going to be highly dependent on point of measurement and not measure the overall noise production in any way.

Even the previous 18mm was way too close, but they had too high ambient noise to hear the newer drives. The correct solution would have been to reduce ambient noise instead of measuring even closer. Obviously since they only measure idle noise, they could power up the HDD alone with a fanless PSU with no cooling fans running anywhere in the room. That should bring the ambient noise down to a more acceptable level.

I believe SPCR noise measurements are performed at a greater distance. Am I correct? But even still, they make the subjective analysis of noise because there is still things like:
- directional noise
- whine, metallic noise, etc.
- vibration

Panamon
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:24 am

Post by Panamon » Sun Mar 04, 2007 12:33 pm

I definitely agree with the above. I've been going off of StorageReview's charts as well as those at TomsHardare, because they tend to compliment each other well (they tend to have a few of the same drives, but many different drives as well, making it fairly simply to figure out where the different drives sit in comparison). It's precisely because of those two sites that I didn't ask for performance - they've got it more than well enough covered. And like whiic says, while SR mentions noise level, they admit that it's not a particularly realistic measurement.

It seems to me that most sites have started at least making the token gesture of measuring decibel levels on newer drives, if only so that they can include "noise levels" in their reviews. They don't do anything nearly as accurate or thorough as SPCR does. Which is why I ask the noise question here. :)

jaganath
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Post by jaganath » Sun Mar 04, 2007 12:49 pm

SR's noise measurements: "Previously, we settled on a distance of 18 millimeters, one close enough to negate most ambient noise.
To the best of my knowledge measuring closer does not "negate" ambient noise.
I believe SPCR noise measurements are performed at a greater distance
Usually 1m, IIRC.

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