Need a new 250GB Silent Drive 3.5"

biatche · Post by **biatche** » Thu May 15, 2008 1:57 pm

I'm currently using 2x Samsung HD161HJ on raid0. The seek/writes are very quiet, but there was one thing i did not look into when i purchased it.

Vibration.

The humming is KILLING ME. It's not even a constant humming sound, it goes up and down. As if it's resonating.

Now what options do I have? I definitely want a 3.5" It should be fast enough, writes/seeks should be silent. and no humming!

my HD501LJ does just that, except, that's a little large for me. even 2x 250gb is an overkill, but price of 250gb to 160gb seem fairly close now. Getting a drive with 16MB cache around the same price over 8MB seems worthy to me

Felger Carbon · Post by **Felger Carbon** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:27 pm

biatche wrote:I'm currently using 2x Samsung HD161HJ on raid0. The humming is KILLING ME. It's not even a constant humming sound, it goes up and down. As if it's resonating.

Your problem is, you have two HDDs mounted on a common piece of sheet metal. They don't rotate at exactly the same RPM and what you're hearing is the "beat note". The solution in general is not to mount two HDDs on a common piece of sheet metal.

Look into suspension. Suspending both HDDs would be best. Look thru the postings in the second sticky in this forum. Good luck!

biatche · Post by **biatche** » Thu May 15, 2008 9:43 pm

my casing has no space for suspension, i have 7 drives in there, all quiet except these ones, ive done the testing.

oh yea, they are enclosed in the passive scythe hard disk box whatever u call that already.

im looking for another drive... what are my options?

FartingBob · Post by **FartingBob** » Fri May 16, 2008 3:48 am

There is very little need for 7 small drives in a system. And all of them would sure make quite a hum when hardmounted. Id recommend getting just a couple of quiet big drives and replace all the smaller ones that are louder and slower.
Look at some of the single platter samsung and WD drives, they come in 320GB capacities now and would be ideal for a multi drive setup since they run cool and quiet.

biatche · Post by **biatche** » Fri May 16, 2008 6:57 am

Yeah, I have 2 TB in total, i want 2 250gb 16MB drives that would run in RAID STRIPE mode as my system drives. 2 drives are amazingly fast.

i run it this way cuz i dont store any important data on them. my other drives are 'archive drives'.. those other drives dont make noise

my current 2x HD161HJ are the source of vibration... the only ones... the rest are perfectly fine and make no annoying vibration / seeks... and even if they did make seek noise, i dont always use the archive drives

no one has yet recommended any silent 250gb 16mb drives

oberbimbo · Post by **oberbimbo** » Sun May 18, 2008 5:43 am

Since speed is what you're after, have you considered the Velociraptor drives? They supposedly are quite silent and as nearly 2.5" drives they should vibrate a lot less...

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14583/15

Nick Geraedts · Post by **Nick Geraedts** » Sun May 18, 2008 6:14 pm

I'd have to recommend the WD3200AAKS. If you're able to get the new single-platter drives, then great, but even the old dual-platter drives are quiet enough for my system. I've got two of them in RAID0 and there's no noticable vibration effects in my case.

biatche · Post by **biatche** » Mon May 19, 2008 1:22 pm

thanks for the responses. i wonder why my HD161HJ vibrates so much.. compared to my other disks including raptor

the velociraptor looks mighty nice... but, im guessing it carries a might high price tag

kojack · Post by **kojack** » Fri May 23, 2008 4:17 am

I have 2 seagate 250s and they are near silent. they are very very quiet. my case came with rubber mounting so that cuts out the "beat note" I have 4 in total 2 80 in raid 0 for my OS and programs, and 2 250s in raid 1 for storage. and I cant really hear my hard drives....Im so impressed with my seagates im loadign 2 in my notebook. a 160 for programs, and a 250 for storage.

battery life is not a huge issue with me. I will have a couple of extended drain batterys for it anyways.

but look into seagates.....5 year warranty too.

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Fri May 23, 2008 7:20 am

first, i would recommend you read this review:
http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index ... iveVsRaid0

"Again, RAID 0 does have its advantages in a handful of key applications and uses where data files are huge and/or data requests are highly sequential in nature. Data requests are NOT highly sequential, however, in typical desktop productivity and most gaming usage patterns..."

So if your doing raid0 to help with gamming and typical desktop performance, all your doing is throwing money out the window.

If your willing to shell out that kinda cash though for performance, look at the new 300gb 2.5" western digital velociraptors comming out in less than a month. One will cost about as much as two of your 3.5" drives in raid0.

biatche · Post by **biatche** » Tue May 27, 2008 12:00 pm

i used to use a raptor.. i then switched to my raid0 setup, and i feel that everything loads faster... makes me wonder now then, why would anyone use raid0 setup..

Need a new 250GB Silent Drive 3.5"

Need a new 250GB Silent Drive 3.5"

Re: Need a new 250GB Silent Drive 3.5"