I need a silent large drive (excluding WD)

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Achiles
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I need a silent large drive (excluding WD)

Post by Achiles » Sat Apr 18, 2009 7:07 am

I need a silent large drive excluding Western Digidal ones. I've been tempted to buy WD Green Power but heard they die alot and had some bad experiences with this brand myself .

I'm looking after some Samsungs but don't know if there's one model who can reach the WD Green Power performances regarding the silence . Is there any ?

Vicotnik
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Post by Vicotnik » Sat Apr 18, 2009 7:21 am

No manufacturer is perfect. There may be reasons to avoid the WD GPs, if for example you need a very fast drive, or don't like the unloading heads.
But you should not avoid the WD GP just because of superstition. The WD GPs are not for every possible application but they are still great HDDs. Where have you heard that they die alot?

Achiles
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Post by Achiles » Sat Apr 18, 2009 7:30 am

Vicotnik wrote:No manufacturer is perfect. There may be reasons to avoid the WD GPs, if for example you need a very fast drive, or don't like the unloading heads.
But you should not avoid the WD GP just because of superstition. The WD GPs are not for every possible application but they are still great HDDs. Where have you heard that they die alot?
From my personal experience, i've had 2 HDD one Samsung and one WD. The WD died after 1 year and something while the Samsung works perfectly fine . Now i'm searching for bigger drives, was going to buy WD Green Power 640 GB, (read a review on this website about it) after that find out they have some technical problems.

Look in the sticky threads after "WARNING: WD Green Power drives may kill themselves" ... I find Samsung drives safer then WD's :!:

yensteel
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Post by yensteel » Sat Apr 18, 2009 7:48 am

Samsung's F2 and Seagate's Pipeline HD drives are your best bet then. You can also consider the Samsung F1 if the others are too slow.

Vicotnik
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Post by Vicotnik » Sat Apr 18, 2009 7:55 am

Then buy a Samsung HDD. :)

I'm just saying that as far as I know, the WD GPs aren't really dying. It's just that they may unload/load their heads an awful lot in some situations. That might not be so good, but it's not like the WD GPs are dropping like flies.

If you think that you might use the drive where the unloading heads might be a problem, then avoid the WD GP. But to avoid a popular HDD like the WD GP just because you had some problems with a single WD drive years ago is not very rational imho. Like I said in the first post; no manufacturer is perfect. After a while you kind of run out of manufacturers. :)

Your WD had problems, Hitachi is out of the question (remember the DeathStars?), Seagate is no go bacause of loud drives and the flaky 1.5TB-drive, the Samsungs vibrate to much etc. etc.

Ignore the manufacturer and take a rational look at the model. I'm not saying the WD GP is the drive for you. I just happen to think it's the greatest drive for storage on the market today and it would be a shame if you would dismiss it for no good reason.

Achiles
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Post by Achiles » Sat Apr 18, 2009 9:28 am

Vicotnik wrote:Then buy a Samsung HDD. :)

I'm just saying that as far as I know, the WD GPs aren't really dying. It's just that they may unload/load their heads an awful lot in some situations. That might not be so good, but it's not like the WD GPs are dropping like flies.

If you think that you might use the drive where the unloading heads might be a problem, then avoid the WD GP. But to avoid a popular HDD like the WD GP just because you had some problems with a single WD drive years ago is not very rational imho. Like I said in the first post; no manufacturer is perfect. After a while you kind of run out of manufacturers. :)

Your WD had problems, Hitachi is out of the question (remember the DeathStars?), Seagate is no go bacause of loud drives and the flaky 1.5TB-drive, the Samsungs vibrate to much etc. etc.

Ignore the manufacturer and take a rational look at the model. I'm not saying the WD GP is the drive for you. I just happen to think it's the greatest drive for storage on the market today and it would be a shame if you would dismiss it for no good reason.
You're right when you're saying no manufacturer is perfect but there's a big difference between fiability like being louder, too much vibration and stuff like this and breaking and malfunctioning :P . I don't want to throw over 100 euros out of the window and lose all my data suddenly :roll: and because of this I put safaty first, from what i've read in this forum i've seen many people saying their WD drives either break, either malfunctioning so this is not an isolate case.

I'm thinking into an Samsung EcoGreen 500 or 1000 GB . Does these have only 5400 r/m ? This means they're slower right ? I'll use it as a storage so I don't think it will count very much.

Blue_Sky
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Post by Blue_Sky » Sat Apr 18, 2009 3:00 pm

It is important to remember that you shouldn't let your own experiences with hard drive longevity by manufacturer influence your decision. Very few people have dealt with enough hard drives (not just by manufacturer, but by model) to make a statistically significant conclusion. We are at the point that most hard drives are manufactured using similar equipment, to similar standards, with similar quality control.
I know I am guilty of recommending WD HDs over similar drives because have had many seagate and hitachi drives fail on me compared to WD. Either way, I haven't had 100+ drives of the same model running under similar circumstances, so I'm not really qualified to make that recommendation. I expect that most other people here don't either.

Choose your drives on another basis (noise, speed, power draw, warranty, cost, etc).

KnightRT
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Post by KnightRT » Sat Apr 18, 2009 3:01 pm

9 of the top 10 highest-rated 3.5" drives on Newegg are from WD. If you're not satisfied with them, you might as well transcribe your data to stone tablets because you won't be satisfied with anything. I've personally had 7 WD10EACS/EADS drives in 24/7 operation, three of them for over six months. Not one has even hiccuped, ever. You have no idea what you're talking about.

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Post by nutball » Sun Apr 19, 2009 12:31 am

edit: *never mind* these discussions are pointless

Cryoburner
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Post by Cryoburner » Mon Apr 20, 2009 7:30 am

Achiles wrote:Look in the sticky threads after "WARNING: WD Green Power drives may kill themselves" ... I find Samsung drives safer then WD's :!:
That's why I said that thread really needs to be retitled. It's incredibly deceptive, especially considering that no one has ever verified that the excessive head parking actually reduces the drive's life expectancy. There are other drives that do have known reliability issues, but people just see a pinned thread with WARNING in capital letters and assume there's some serious known problem with WD drives. The fact is, the GP series drives aren't any less reliable than others, and only exibit the problem under certain software conditions. These conditions can even be adjusted to prevent the heads from repeatedly parking. It's not a bad topic to keep pinned, but it really should be renamed to something that more accurately describes the situation.

PartEleven
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Post by PartEleven » Mon Apr 20, 2009 8:44 am

I don't want to keep beating the topic to death, but I find it's a futile attempt to change someone's opinion once they've convinced themselves that a certain manufacturer makes unreliable hard drives. You'll have to show them first-hand how they're misguided by either forcing them to use drives by the "unreliable" manufacturer or have multiple drives from their trusted manufacturer fail.

CX23882-19
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Post by CX23882-19 » Tue Apr 21, 2009 1:20 pm

In my opinion, the majority of "faulty" hard drives are caused by the end-user mis-handling them, with the exception of drives known to have design flaws (IBM 75GXP) or buggy firmware (Seagate 7200.11). I don't mean this in an inflammatory way, so please don't take offence from it. There will be a percentage of drives which were bad to begin with and were destined to fail early.

But going back to end-user inflicted failures. You might not even remember when you damaged it. It might have been when you accidentally rolled your chair into the computer, or when you just moved the tower slightly to plug something in the back. It may have been weeks prior to the failure but the damage was done and sealed the drive's fate. Given the poor shipping containers that some stores use, it may have occured before the drive even reached your door, banging around in a UPS or CityLink van.

I never move my system whilst it's running, and when installing a new drive I treat it as I would treat a thin sheet of glass, carefully placing it down and usually placing it on some foam rather than directly onto a hard surface. Others that I know don't take the same care, and effectively bang them down on the desk after removing them from the box. Worse still they do things like connect everything up to the PC and power it up to check that it's working, and then whilst it's still booting move it back to its normal place under the desk. They also seem to get a lot of bad hard drives, but it's clear to me where the fault lies.

Western Digital make fine drives.

closersource
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Post by closersource » Tue Apr 21, 2009 6:06 pm

The majority of faulty hard drives are caused by poor packaging for shipment.

Samsung (F1's) have been widely known to develop bad sectors in a year. Seagate has had firmware problems and a persistent anomaly of reporting read/seek errors. Hitachi's are still tainted by the Deathstar name and consistently run hotter than other drives. WD has had problems with stuck heads on many consumer Caviar models. Fujitsu's have many proprietary SMART values report as FAIL on other manufacturer's test tools. Maxtor has had many firmware problems over the years, and is ironically now part of Seagate. So...
Last edited by closersource on Sat Oct 23, 2010 2:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

LodeHacker
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Post by LodeHacker » Wed Apr 22, 2009 5:46 am

In an attempt to put something useful in this thread, here follows the ultimate answer:

1. Take all money in your wallet and calculate how much you've got.
2. Divide the sum in half and put the other half back in your wallet.
3. Now with the money in your hand go to the nearest PC store.
4. Ask/Look for HDDs priced less than the money you've got.
5. REMEMBER to exclude Western Digital ones, they're bullshit.
6. Now look for a drive that has the most bling. Is important, y'know!
7. Don't look for reliable/quiet, you don't know how to look for one.
8. Now with this crap HDD in your hand, go and buy it. Buy with pride!
9. Now take out the other half of the money you put in your wallet.
10. Buy chocolate with the money as much as you can. Don't eat yet!
11. Upon coming home and discovering the HDD was crap, cry hard.
12. Now eat the chocolate you bought to compensate for your sorrow.
13. It's time you learn to respect Western Digital. If not, I'll kick your ass.

vick1000
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Post by vick1000 » Wed Apr 22, 2009 7:37 pm

I build lots of computers with consumer level drives, I have had more Samsung drives fail than WD by far. Since the introduction of FDBs in WD drives, I have had zero failures. As recently as January I have had 2 newer F1 Samsungs start clicking and hang during detection rendering the systems unbootable until they were removed.

As far as quiet drives go, WD can't be beat right now regardless of your single drive failure statistic.

Dazrin
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Post by Dazrin » Wed Apr 22, 2009 8:10 pm

I haven't looked for any reviews, but Seagate appears to have a new competitor to the GP.

http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/16791

Michael Sandstrom
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Post by Michael Sandstrom » Wed Apr 22, 2009 11:04 pm

None of my eight Samsung drives has ever failed or become noisy. I have two 1GB F1 drives and I would not hesitate to buy another. I plan to stick with Samsung until I get a bad experience.

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Post by MikeC » Wed Apr 22, 2009 11:06 pm

Dazrin wrote:I haven't looked for any reviews, but Seagate appears to have a new competitor to the GP.

http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/16791
Yup, Barracuda LP are 5900rpm, announced today. Like the Pipeline series we reviewed. Pipeline HD.2 samples are here in the lab; both 500gb and 1tb versions are 5900rpm. We will have the Barracuda LP samples soon enough.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/produc ... rracuda_lp

Tech Report's comparison of the noise specs for Barracuda LP vs. WD GP is incorrect btw. They're comparing the Seagate's BEL sound power vs WD's SPL in dBA at 1m. Quite different units.

Looks to me like Seagate is reviving its interest in low noise drives that they seemed to abandon after the Barracuda IV & V.

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