Samsung HD502HI vs WD Scorpio Blue 5000BEVT

[robbie13]

Is the notebook HDD worth the double price?

I've read the SPCR review of the Samsung, it seems like a good budget silent drive.

I've got a WD 5000AAKS, annoyingly loud idle, and an old seagate ST3250410AS, a single platter, much quieter that the WD.

I want to replace the WD with a silent drive, and move the OS to the seagate, until I get a SSD.

Oh and Hi, this is my first post

[Ksanderash]

Welcome to SPCR

These both are top ones from the point of low noice emission. If I wasn't straitened financially, I would try with BEVT.

[RoGuE]

Is the notebook HDD worth the double price?

Absolutely not. The reason notebook HDD's are more expensive is a lot of design work went into make them smaller (driving up the cost). Also, they typically require a higher storage desity on each platter.

Get a nice quiet DESKTOP drive, and think about suspending it so it doesn't resonate your case's pannels. Pick out the right drive, and decouple it from the case, and you wont hear it. Garenteed.

[whiic]

How about 1TB Samsung F2 Ecogreen, and retiring both your noisy WD and your old Seagate? Despite lower rpm, Samsungs have desktop optimized firmware and higher density platters compared to your Seagate. You'd probably get better real-life application performance from a modern 5400rpm non-Seagate than you'd get from 250GB 7200.10.

Just partition it to two parts, put OS on first, and your data on the second partition. Then, when SSDs become affordable, you can just clone the first partition to SSD... and by that time, it might also be beneficial to update the HDD to something even bigger as I would assume it'd take several years for SSDs to become cheap & big enough. Or alternatively you'd notice that 5400rpm desktop drive is indeed quiet enough and would no longer see SSD as a "must" purchase.

High capacity laptop drive is another option but 500GB lappy is going to cost more than 1000GB desktop HDD. It's likely quieter but ... well, both of my 320GB WD Scorpio samples have made quite loud hissing noise for low-rpm laptop sized drives. Compared to desktop drives, they are still quiet but with the choice of using low-rpm desktop HDD, I don't think they are worth the extra price.

Low-rpm lappies do have strong potential, because they have very low moving mass combined with slow spindle rate. But they are also designed to fit into laptop computers, meaning they also have low stationary mass and external dimensions. This means the top cover of these HDDs is about paper thick, and so it the base cast, allowing turbulent noise to exit pretty freely, if it's not designed properly. Most of the awesome silencing potential of laptop HDDs is wasted by compromising as being silent is not on top of the priority list. If they made all laptop drives as quiet as for example a 80GB Toshiba sample I happen to own (came with my laptop but I replaced it with a bigger one), I would no doubt recommend going with laptop HDD... but alas: most laptop drives make far more noise than it does. If they were all like that certain Toshiba, even SSDs would be overkill.

Where as I was disappointed with 320GB Scorpios (I have two), I was surprized with F2 Ecogreen. At least my sample is better than Greenpowers... which of course ain't bad at all. Not to mention, F2 Ecogreen does have high rata rates due to high areal density, so it outperforms Greenpowers. And even Greenpowers ourperform laptop HDDs as they have bigger diameter disk (speed at which media rotates under the R/W head is bigger despite having same rpm).

Give them a chance. 5400rpm desktop nearly got extinct... for a ridiculous reason, IMO, as "decent" desktop performance doesn't actually require 7200rpm. In fact, firmware matters more than just spindle speed.

___


EDIT:
Also, I'd add, laptop sized HDD was a very good silencing niché (in addition to being de facto solution for laptop computers) back when desktop sized HDDs were only available in 7200rpm, 10000rpm and 15000rpm variants (as well as some old-tech ball-bearing 5400rpm ones which were also too noisy for silencers). Back then 5400rpm laptop drive was wayyyyyy~ quieter than any desktop drive.

Even back then some silencers wanted 7200rpm laptop drives. I was always, "why the heck", because they inversted twice the amount to get laptop size, then doubling the doubled price to get the same high rpm of desktop, sacrificing some of the low noise, while still not reaching performance of 7200rpm desktop.

Then 5400rpm desktop returned... and it's probably quieter than 7200rpm laptop. If someone want's a 7200rpm laptop drive for four times the price of 5400rpm desktop drive with equivalent performance and noise, I'm really calling him/her/it an idiot. Even 5400rpm laptop is rather questionable option, even though it's quieter and only twice as costly as 7200rpm laptop.

[robbie13]

Get a nice quiet DESKTOP drive, and think about suspending it so it doesn't resonate your case's pannels. Pick out the right drive

Well that's not really easy, is it?

How about 1TB Samsung F2 Ecogreen, and retiring both your noisy WD and your old Seagate?

first of all, wow! what a reply !

I prefer silence to capacity. The 500GB is quieter?

It is somewhat cheaper, if I'm happy with it I'll get another 0.5TB or 1TB in the future.

[RoGuE]

Get a nice quiet DESKTOP drive, and think about suspending it so it doesn't resonate your case's pannels. Pick out the right drive

Well that's not really easy, is it?

yeah it is pretty easy actually.

[whiic]

robbie13: "I prefer silence to capacity. The 500GB is quieter?

It is somewhat cheaper, if I'm happy with it I'll get another 0.5TB or 1TB in the future."

A) Yes, 500GB is quieter. But 2x 500GB is noisier than 1x 1000GB.

B) 1x 500GB may also be a couple bucks cheaper than 1x 1000GB but if you end up buying another 500GB, it's going to cost a whole lot more with two 500-giggers.

The point why I recommended 1TB is because you're current capacity is 500+250GB. It would have been odd if I recommended replacing both with a single 500-gigger. (Considering 750-giggers are just short-stroked, and thus not a bit quieter than 1000-giggers.)

Also, the price difference between 500 and 1000GB is really quite minimal. Basically everything up to 1.5TB have good GB/money ratio... 2TB is probably the only variant that's way off the scale. Well, that, and the very small capacity drive which tend to cost the same as medium capacity drives, and thus have quite astronomical price compared to puny capacity they offer.

The very point of going straight to 1TB is to
A) stick to one single drive (no vibrational interference, lower acoustic noise, lower power consumption, etc.)
B) save money

If you buy 500GB, then later buy another 500GB. It's not optimal. If you later buy a 1TB as a replacement, you wouldn't get much money from used hardware.

So... get it done right the first time. There is a saying, poor people cannot afford to spare money by saving it in the wrong place. Buying a drive that you know needs replacing or supplementing with another, is a known bad decision. Use the extra 10...20 eur to get twice the capacity, and spare 50 eur in later purchaces.

You might even go straight to 1.5TB (as it's the highest economical capacity point currently) if you believe you're storage needs keep growing during next few years. If you think current capacity will be ok, go with 1TB. But don't go with something you know is not going to suffice for you even today (not to mention in near future).

[robbie13]

How mouch louder can I expect the dual platter to be?

SPCR says 12dB idle for the single platter. Samsung says 2.2 bel single, 2.5 bell dual idle, thats not even 15%, thats still under 14dB which is alot quieter than the Caviar Green.

The single platter is somewhat slower than Caviar Green, is the dual platter faster than the single platter?

[whiic]

"How mouch louder can I expect the dual platter to be?"

Using a very scientific term: "a bit".

But I guarantee, 2-platter 5400rpm drive is still pretty damn quiet. Heck, even good old 1st generation (4-platter) Greenpower beats vast majority of 1-platter 7200rpm, so if your choices are:
1-platter F2 Ecogreen + 1-platter 7200rpm Seagate
or
2-platter F2 Ecogreen
...there REALLY is absolutely no doubt the latter is much much quieter. Really. Don't worry about the extra platter. 5400rpm drives are almost dead silent no matter how many platters they have inside.

From personal experience, 1TB F2 Ecogreen (2-platter) is much quieter than both 3-platter and 4-platter Greenpowers, and these 1st and 2nd generation Greenpowers are very quiet so it's quite a good achievement to beat them by a noticeable margin. (I only measured noise subjectively, no microphone or SPL meter.)

I have no 500GB F2 Ecogreen to compare my 2, 3 and 4 platter EGs and GPs, but I can pretty much guarentee that if you've grown accustomed to 7200rpm, you'd be in total silencer's heaven with ANY of current low-rpm offerings.

"The single platter is somewhat slower than Caviar Green, is the dual platter faster than the single platter?"

Eh? Is it slower? I ain't denying it since I really don't have one, but I really got surprized reading that since my benchmarks show F2 Ecogreen (1TB) has equally good sequential transfer rate as F1 7200rpm, and that F2 is quite a bit faster than 1st and 2nd generation GPs.

Of course, if you compare to 3rd generation GP (with 2 platters to make 1TB), then it might be true. A 3rd gen GP is a valid competitor to F2. The biggest problem is: how do you know if the drive you're buying is a 3rd gen and not a 2nd gen?

You would need the full product code. Like:
WD10EACS-00ZJB0 (1st gen 1TB)
WD10EACS-00D6B0 (2nd gen 1TB)

Of course if you pick the drive from a shelf you can read the label on top of the HDD. But if you have to order the drive via Internet, you're most likely screwed.

Also, you'd probably want WD10EADS for 32MB cache. F2 Ecogreen has 32MB cache for higher capacity variants (like HD103SI). GP has low-cache variants as well.

If you can't be certain what generation WD you'd get, F2 EG is certainly 500GB/platter. (F1 EG has 333GB/pl, thus corresponds to 2nd gen Greenpower.)

[kaange]

Get a nice quiet DESKTOP drive, and think about suspending it so it doesn't resonate your case's panels. Pick out the right drive

Well that's not really easy, is it?

With your case, it's incredibly easy if you don't need to transport it around. All you need to do is unbolt the HDD cage and then lay it on it's side on some foam (I use the packing foam that came with my motherboard).