New 1TB or 1,5TB disks to my homeserver.

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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everlong
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Joined: Fri Dec 11, 2009 7:01 am
Location: Norway

New 1TB or 1,5TB disks to my homeserver.

Post by everlong » Fri Dec 11, 2009 7:18 am

Hi,

I'm looking for 4 new disks to be in a raid5 configuration. The disks is gonna be used for storage for media-files (music and video) to be streamed to a squeezebox and a htpc. They also gonna have some backup documents from 2 laptops.

I got some Samsung f1 disks now and I'm happy with those. But now I need more space and thinking of upgrading to some that uses low power and are silence. There won't be much transfer in my network so I think 5400rpm disks should work. Any recommendations for low poser and low noise 5400 disks?

And if I should choose 7200rpm disks, which should I take then?

First post here, but not the first time I've used it :)

dream caster
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Location: Chile

Post by dream caster » Fri Dec 11, 2009 1:48 pm

I think your best bet is Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB WD15EADS look at this review here in Silent PC Review. the link is for conclusions, also in look in page 5. As conclusions say that hard disk is specially vibration free, uses less power and is cheaper for each megabyte but Green Caviar 1TB and 2tB are equally silent (but not equally vibration free nor equally energy efficient).

These Caviar Green are the most silent hard disks I've found and they are 5400 disks.

Firetech
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Post by Firetech » Fri Dec 11, 2009 2:36 pm

Agree with the above.

whiic
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Location: Finland

Post by whiic » Fri Dec 11, 2009 4:43 pm

From personal experience, 1.0TB (2-platter) Samsung F2 Ecogreens have quite a bit quieter and smoother idle than WD10EACS-00ZJB0 (4-platter), WD10EACS-00D6B0 (3-platter), WD20EADS-00S2B0 (4-platter). Granted, it's an unfair comparison, with Samsung having less platters than any of my other high-cap HDDs, but the difference is noticeable.

When it comes to seek noises, WDs are much quieter than Samsungs. When it comes to power consumption - again: WD are way better.

Vibration: my Samsungs have next to no vibration. I have several laptop drives that vibrate more than they do. WD Greenpowers aren't bad but for 5400rpm drives, they aren't that incredible. But more important than this, I can guarantee that vibration is all about luck. For example: one 3-platter F1 Spinpoint very low vibration (around what you'd expect from
1-platter, or a laptop HDD) but another sample of same model was pretty horrible. Vibration tests done with less than 10 samples are unreliable. Unlike idle and seek noise, vibration varies so much more between samples than other kinds of noise. Take no review based on single sample as worth ANYTHING when it comes to vibration. Even when coming from SPCR that measures properly: proper measurement cannot nullify the fact that sample variance is huge in this particular drive noise characteristic.

Price? If you're going to do RAID1 or RAID5, you might have to use expensive RAID edition Greenpowers to prevent disks from dropping from array. Though, in cases when a HDD drops out of an array due to too long error recovery, you're probably already dealing with a drive in bad condition...

OS issue: Greenpowers are "incompatible" with Linux due to 8 second automatic unload on idle. Linux does some polling several times a minute (I don't remember whether it was every 10 or 20 seconds) which causes repeated clicking and potentially wear and tear (though it has been proven already that reliability spec of 300000 unloads can be exceeded by a factor of 10 (i.e millions of unloads) and HDDs still aren't showing excessive death toll). This issue can be eliminated by creating periodic writes to disk at shorter than 8 second intervals. This however eliminates any power saving compared to Samsung F2. In Windows, unloads are less of an issue but some utilities like SpeedFan can cause one unload per 60 seconds if not configured properly (to not monitor HDD temperature of affected drives).

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