7200rpm(Sam, WD, Sea) vs 5400rpm(Sam, WD) for noise

[Janet Reno]

Hello,
Long ago I purchased a Samsung Spinpoint P Series 7200RPM drive with NIDEC bearings based on information from this site. Thank you.

My case was very quiet and above ambient furnace noise all I remember was the sound of quiet moving air.

I don't recall the drive being bothersome, even though it was 7200rpm. I think I remember trying to listen for the thing in my case and never could identify it.

So basically I want to know if current generation 7200rpm drives are like this one? I've read all over the forums that the Samsung Spinpoint F1/F3 along with the Seagate 7200.12's are loud(even though a few have said they're quiet). lol, it's so difficult sometimes. The F1 is rated as a top 7200rpm drive on this site.

And from what I can garner the WD Green and Samsung Ecogreen F3 are mostly inaudible or very quiet. I would still prefer a 7200, but not at the cost of high pitched noise. That's the type of noise that I will do without. If there's a little jitter every once and a while from it or something that doesn't seem like it's attacking my ears for hours on end, I think I could live with that.

However, there's one other drive I've read about. The WD Blue, which is a 7200rpm drive. Has anyone tried this? Is it truly "quiet" as I've seen posted here more than once? Or are there naysayers? Speak quickly!

I'm not interested in getting a hard drive silencer.

Any help is appreciated.

[MikeC]

Welcome back to SPCR.

Many 7200rpm drives are pretty quiet these days. All of them use fluid dynamic bearings, so have little of that high pitched whine that was so prevalent in the ball bearing days.

Another 7200 Samsung will probably serve you fine if you were happy with the P Nidec. Seagate drives still make more seek/write noise than most of the others; Samsung and WD tend to be quietest, more or less in that order, although it will vary with sample and model.

Finally, the difference in actual performance between typical 7200rpm and 5400/5900rpm drives is small. Areal density is very high in most, and this tneds to determine overall throughput. There are many bottlenecks in PCs still (other than HDDs) and you'd have to work hard and use heavily disk-intensive apps to really be aware of the difference. The slower spinning drives ARE significantly, audibly quieter. (12~14 dBA/1m idle vs 16~20 dBA/1m)

Summary here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/Recommended_Hard_Drives

[whiic]

What MikeC said is true.

But I would like to point out that if you were happy with 7200rpm Samsung P-series (80GB or 120GB/platter), you would most likely notice an improvement in performance when switching to 5400rpm Samsung EG (500GB/platter), despite the lower rpm.

While it's true that no new drive (5400 or 7200rpm) has ball-bearing and all whine produced by them is electrical (which doesn't get worse with increase rpm), and that most modern 7200rpm drives are about as good as best 7200rpm drives were a few years back, there also another fact about them: they're also about as bad as best 7200rpm were a few years back.

If you are annoyed by 1(?)-platter P80 or P120 series Samsung, you might be annoyed by a F1/F3 Spinpoint as well (even though they're on the recommended list for quiet 7200rpm)... and even more likely to be disappointed with Seagate.

I'd say, give 5400rpm a chance. Once you've tried it and noticed the nearly complete lack of any type of noise, you can't go back to 7200rpm. It's addictive.

[Janet Reno]

Thank you for your replies. You have been incredibly helpful.