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Hardware

Hard Drives Evaluated for Noise, Heat and Performance 318

Posted by michael from the burning-issues dept.
Sander Sassen writes "Ever wondered what harddisks offer the best combination of performance and low noise? Hardware Analysis evaluates all recent 5400 and 7200-rpm harddisks and focuses on noise, heat production and overall performance. Their results show that 7200-rpm spindle speed is no guarantee for high-performance and that low-noise and high-performance is not an impossible combination with some harddisks."
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Hard Drives Evaluated for Noise, Heat and Performance More

Hard Drives Evaluated for Noise, Heat and Performance

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  • I have only one thing to say... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by keep_it_simple_stupi ( 562690 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @01:53PM (#4368791) Homepage
    It's about damned time. We have more than enough reviews on speed and performance, but there is a serious dearth of information on noise.

    • Re:I have only one thing to say... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Soko ( 17987 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:14PM (#4368969) Homepage
      What did you say??? I can't hear you with all my disks spun up.

      What about damned limes???? Death of information on no ice? Hunh??

      Please repeat, and this time SPEAK LOUDER, PLEASE!!!

      Soko

    • Re:I have only one thing to say... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sivar ( 316343 ) <charlesnburns[@]gmail...com> on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:11PM (#4369387)
      Storagereview.com [storagereview.com] has had noise and heat statistics for years.

      Actually, it is a better reference than this quoted article because you can tell SR.com to compare all the drives you are interested in purchasing and get good* benchmarks, heat/noise, and can sort by specific benchmark.
      Go to the website, click "database" (near the top) and choose your criteria. In ten seconds you can find out the noise/heat/speed of every drive SR has ever reviewed, with a rather nice labelled bar graph for clarity.
      You can also visit the forums and get advice from some of the most knowledgeable people in the IT industry, and get information that is difficult to come by anywhere else--for example, that Samsung makes the most reliable (albeit close to the slowest) IDE hard drive. SR was also the first to discover that Seagate planned to reduce their warranty and that there are terrible SCSI performance bugs in Windows XP, among others.
      A very good resource, and it's been slashdotted without the server being brought to its knees. (It runs Linux/Apache/PHP)
  • Fastest. Slashdotting. Ever.

    • Re:Wow! (Score:2, Funny)

      by BLAG-blast ( 302533 )
      Fastest. Slashdotting. Ever.

      Yeah, imagine the sound of all the hard drive chirps as 100,000 geeks longing for quieter hard drives click on the link...

      Maybe tomorrow then....

      PS: does anybody know if they cover laptop harddrives as well?

      • Re:Wow! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Brad Wilson ( 462844 )
        I'll give you my experience with one hard drive: the current model IBM 60GB, 5400 RPM, 12.5mm hard drive. I put it into my Compaq Presario laptop. This drive is silent! It's unbelievable. I use this box for dev, and it regularly thrashes the hard drive -- presumably. I can't hear it if it does. :)

        The guy who sits next to me has whatever default drive is in the monster Sony Vaio, and that thing is incredibly noisy.

  • What I've known all along- (Score:4, Informative)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @01:54PM (#4368805) Homepage Journal
    Seagate's Barracuda IV drives are great! Exceptionally quiet (the CPU cooling fan generates more noise) and I've not run across a single failure in ~100 sold.
    • Seagate owns. Those Barracuda IV's are one of the 'older' 80GB HDDs on the market and I still prefer them over new harddrives from Western Digital and Samsung. They're just well-built drives that I can depend on, as well as a number of my friends who have bought them. IBM's are still great too, but I'm uncertain as to what to think of Hitatchi's aquisition of IBM's hard drive technology.

      On a side note: NEVER EVER buy a Western Digital. Those are the most unreliable pieces of crap ever. I'm sorry if I sound like a troll, but I've personally seen more broken WD hard drives than all other brand HDDs combined.
      • The problem is that everybody's sample set is too small to really make good reccomendations on this. Even people with computer labs or white box guys don't have anything close to a single percent of the number of drives at any time. For instance, I have two WD drives, an 800MB and a 2.1GB drive. Both still work great despite being abused for years. The Quantum drives however....
        • Small samples, and short test times... Think about how manufacturers come up with numbers like 1 million hours MTBF.

          I once had about 20 model-x drives, 5 of which crashed in a 2 month period. They were all about 18 months old, ran 24x7 and were factory installed in RISC workstations. In 262,800 drive-hours we had five failures. The failure rate was 2000% of what it *should* have been, and the failures were not spread out over time. They just started popping. Other models of drives in the same type of workstation were doing just fine.

          The drive manufacturer told us "1,000,000 hours MTBF means that if you ran a million drives for 1 hour, you could expect 1 failure". In other words, it says absolutely nothing about what drives will do at 1 year old. In this case, it turned out that the heads were falling off the arms when the glue dried out. It was the type of failure they never could have considered in their MTBF guesstimates.

          You never know if it was a reliable design until it's obsolete :-(

    • Serial ATA (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 )
      Ok, I've been watching for the Barracuda V [seagate.com] drives for a while and it's nice to see that the Barracuda drives are quiet, with good performance (got the dirt right off Seagate [seagate.com]'s page), but where the heck are the SATA drives?

      One comes up on Pricewatch [pricewatch.com] and Google, which frequently highlights vendors, has only brought up articles, reviews, passing references for the ST3120023AS

      Note: The second Seagate link gives some idea of where SATA is going, starting at 150MBytes/sec external transfer speed, yet their tech spec [seagate.com] indicates 150Mbits/sec. So far benchs show no advantage, unless you prefer/need the wiring change. Your milage may vary.

    • uh? A military jet also makes more noise than an HD, but that's hardly a compliment for the HD. For most people reading this the CPU fan is by far the loudest thing in the box.
    • The IVs may be. I have some old first gen Fast SCSI 7200 RPM units. Loudest damn drives I've ever owned.

  • When it Slashdotted, here is the conclusion (Score:5, Informative)

    by ites ( 600337 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @01:55PM (#4368814) Journal
    As evident from our benchmarks and the noise and heat production measurements the 80GB, Western Digital 800JB with 8MB cache and the 120GB, IBM 120GXP offer the best combination of performance, noise and heat levels. The IBM has our preference as it has the largest capacity and thus offers the best price/performance ratio.

    If you're looking for a good 7200-rpm harddisk then look no further than the Western Digital WD800BB, with 2MB cache, just a tad bit slower than the WD800JB which features 8MB of cache. The surprising newcomer is the Samsung SP8004H that scores well on all fronts and certainly deserves your attention too.

    Equally surprising was the performance of Western Digital's 400AB and 800AB, both 5400-rpm harddisks showed exceptional performance on par with all but the fastest 7200-rpm harddisks. If you're looking for an affordable, high-performance and yet silent 5400-rpm harddisk either of these will fit your needs exactly.

    If you're however looking for a harddisk that offers an impressive combination of performance and low noise then look no further than Seagate's ST380021A Barracuda IV, it really is an engineering marvel that combines the best of both worlds. No match for the IBM or Western Digital but a fair trade-off between performance and noise level.

    • If you're however looking for a harddisk that offers an impressive combination of performance and low noise then look no further than Seagate's ST380021A Barracuda IV, it really is an engineering marvel that combines the best of both worlds. No match for the IBM or Western Digital but a fair trade-off between performance and noise level.

      I too have been very impressed by the Barracuda IV's, they are put near silent and come in nice round 20GB increments. I've built probably a dozen systems with various sizes of this drive in them and have yet to see one go flaky.

      As a white-box maker, performance isn't foremost in my selection criteria, reliability is and these Seagates are about the only drive I've used that I haven't had some sort of issue with. As an added bonus, they are usually $10-$15 cheaper than a Maxtor or WD of the same capacity and RPM.

      Just my experience...ymmv....

      -Sokie
      • I would also recommend the Barracuda IV. It has good performance, and it is super quiet! I am using my Barracuda IV 80GB harddrive in my otherwise solid state Via Eden based PC. No fans, and the only moving parts are in the harddrive, which as stated is extremely quiet.

        My CRT makes more noise than my Eden + Barracuda IV computer.

  • Heat, noise critical for non-computer applications (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @01:56PM (#4368823) Homepage Journal
    If you follow discussions at other forums for ReplayTV and TiVo owners, you already know that in that situation you don't really care about performance. A 5400rpm drive can easily handle the job. However, noise is critical, and hence, some of these systems don't have fans, making heat also critical--if you upgrade with a drive that runs hotter than the original, you're likely to have random failures.

    So this sort of review is wonderful, both for the information it provides, and for encouraging manufacturers to pay attention to these factors so that they will look good in the future.
  • Good thing they did that report so they know what to replace their current drives with when we get done burning all their motors up.

    I'll bet that server is making some noise right now. WHHHHHHHRRRRRRR!!! *snap, crackle, pop*

  • Hmm (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sludge ( 1234 ) <slashdot@@@tossed...org> on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @01:56PM (#4368830) Homepage
    This is a timely article, what with hard drive warranties having just been bumped from three years to one in a few of the leading brands (including Maxtor). Word is the WD w/ 8 meg cache still has 3 years.

  • Ok, here's a question. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dirtside ( 91468 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @01:58PM (#4368851) Journal
    If you've ever played Dungeon Siege, you'll be familiar with the occasional sluggish framerate drop when you get near a new area, and the game starts dynamically loading the artwork and terrain resources for that area, giving the game its contiguous feel. Now I understand that SCSI hard drives have the ability to do non-blocking reads and writes, meaning that the CPU is able to keep processing while waiting for data from the hard drive. If what I think is true, then if I had a SCSI drive and played Dungeon Siege, the sluggishness when it loads new data would not occur, since the game would keep playing while it took a few seconds to load the data in the background.

    If this isn't true... then wouldn't it be cool if hard drives could do this? Having games get sluggish every time they have to load new artwork resources from disk is annoying as hell.
    • Um... Hard drives have been doing this for a long time. That's why you can open a huge file in one program yet keep your game of minesweeper running while you wait.

      The problem you describe will happen when the processor needs the data to continue processing and it isn't in memory yet. The solution to this would be more memory and programming to take advantage of it, in other words, transfering the data from the fixed disk to the memory early enough that the process doesn't wait for IO. That increases the memory footprint. People will complain about the footprint and they'll complain about waiting for IO, so pick a middle road and stick to it.

    • ``the CPU is able to keep processing while waiting for data from the hard drive.''
      IDE drives can do this. It's called DMA.
    • Don't complain. I remember back in the day (well, ok, more like the day after the day... after all, the day goes back sooo far....) when I'd use that load time as an indication that a big bad mob just got loaded or activated... the PC would slow down, and I'd either duck down or backpedal as a matter of instinct... Thats one of the little things that gets lost when we upgrade to big bad hax0r boxXxen, as the kiddies say these days.

      Course, these days I still do that as instinct in games, even though nowadays it's normally one of my background programs doing something. I get nailed for it on LAN parties, as people figured out they just had to start massive network activity on my PC to get me to turn back and hide behind a corner... normally when they were waiting there for me...
    • There are two things that would cause what you are noticing. One is the program actually suspending execution pending a complete read of a data set, and the other is stuttering due to the IRQ's firing for disk access. SCSI will eliminate the latter. Nothing will eliminate the former excepting caches bigger than your max data set, and then only when the cache is filled with the right data at the right time. It's probably a combination of the two that's doing it.

  • After all, when I use my PC, I'm plugged into a pair of headphones. Any noise my box makes is easily filtered out if not drowned out entirely. I don't work inside a data center (unlike some of my fellows), so moderation of headphone volume is the only thing I need to consider when I protect my hearing. PC and Harddrive noise shouldn't matter...

    That is, until I decided to put together a multimedia PC for use in my living room. A 52x CD spin-up is painfully loud during the quiet moments during a movie or my favorite anime. Don't even ask me about a hard-drive wake-up grind or cooling fans.

    In the end, my option was to hide the PC behind a soft fabric cover rather than to try to diminish the noise from the box.

  • benchmarks are interesting, but it brings to mind other test tools.

    Are there test rigs for hard drives, etc that allow for basic functionality testing?

    I recently heard the sad tale of someone whose box was blown by lightning :( and of course they wondered if the drive was okay.

    on plugging the drive into another motherboard, murphy's law kicked in, and he was the proud owner of another dead motherboard.

    So are there test rigs that will allow for testing of drives at a basic level so that motherboards are not used as fuses? Probable uses include IT shops and repair shops.

    • Are there test rigs for hard drives, etc that allow for basic functionality testing?

      There are. I've never actually seen one, but I know they exist. I work in Customer Service Repair for a company that sells rebranded high-end RAIDs (that's not our core business, but it's one of the products I support). I know that our vendor has ways of doing these kind of tests, but we don't. It's something I've thought about, but our units have protection circuits so actual damage isn't an issue for us, it would just be a troubleshooting tool that would allow us to pin down some behavior we've observed.

      Anyway, most likely you'd have to build your own. An old, otherwise useless motherboard (anything new enough to have onboard IDE, all it has to do is spin it up) would likely do the trick, along with a power supply, an IDE cable, and maybe a couple of multimeters. You'd want to hack up the power supply and IDE cables to allow you to measure current on a few of the critical lines. You could also add some fuses or something for protection, if you're into that sort of thing.

      Anyway, my first guess in the situation you discribed is a current spike from the drive on spin-up. The rig I've discribed should test for that, and if you put a fuse on every line it should be a quick test (although you might go through a lot of fuses).

      That's my preliminary concept, anyway, I'm sure there are better ways to do it. It's unlikely I'll ever get around to building it, so feel free to steal my idea.

  • Regardless of the current statistics, I think that hard drives have come a long way as far as noise production. I remember on a lot of my old PC's the huge amount of noise some of the hard-drives (old WD's and Maxtor's) used to make. I never needed to check the little indicator light to tell when my hard drive was whizzing away, you could hear it from the next room.

    I probably won't buy a hard-drive based on noise-factor (or possibly heat factor) alone if the price difference is significant. After the drives of 10 years back, most current models hum like music. When it's just humming away (no data-access clicking), the sound of a hard-drive can actually be somewhat relaxing.

    On an contrary note: I once worked in a testing lab that had about 40+ machines. When they were all running, the room hummed, but the noise was somewhat subliminal. Walking out of the room into a busy office, you definately noticed an increase in noise. On days I worked overtime however, leaving the lab to dead silence was quite noticable... I almost missed the conforting hum sometimes.

    Noise ratings on scanners/printers/CD-ROMS would be nice. These tend to be a lot more irritating than hard drives. Anyone know a site?

  • Western Digital?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bytesmythe ( 58644 ) <bytesmythe@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:06PM (#4368912)
    From the article:
    Equally surprising was the performance of Western Digital's 400AB and 800AB, both 5400-rpm harddisks showed exceptional performance on par with all but the fastest 7200-rpm harddisks. If you're looking for an affordable, high-performance and yet silent 5400-rpm harddisk either of these will fit your needs exactly.

    I have setup many systems (mainly Dells) that ship with Western Digital HDs. A large number of those drives failed very soon thereafter. When Dell came to replace the drives, they were replaced with Maxtors.

    Also, here is a snippet from Gibson Research [grc.com] regarding their SpinRite [grc.com] product.

    Note: We no longer purchase Western Digital drives, even though their retail point of sale packaging is pretty and the drives are inexpensive. We decided that reliability is more important than a pretty box and saving a few bucks, so we've switched over to Quantum drives exclusively, and have been having much better luck ... so far.

    • Re:Western Digital?? (Score:3, Informative)

      by UncleOzzy ( 158525 )

      Amen to that. You'll notice that they give high marks to the WD800BB (7200RPM, 80GB, 2MB cache). I bought this drive last March, and it served me well: fast and reasonably quiet. However, in July, it died. Corrupted boot sector, various bad sectors, etc.

      Unfortunately, this was not a one-off manufacturing error. A friend purchased the same drive about a month later, and his died the same crash-and-burn death as mine about two weeks later. Sounds like these drives just suck. I'm using the replacement they sent me, but only until I can get the scratch together to replace it with a Seagate.

      Caveat emptor on these suckers.

      • Re:Western Digital?? (Score:2, Informative)

        by fandelem ( 559908 )
        My father bought the identical drive you speak of one month ago, and it *refuses* to be the main partition to run an OS. If you do, it just utterly fails at random points during installation/usage. When you make it a slave, it seems to work as anticipated.

        In another light, I've purchased quite a few IBM Deskstar's (80gig, 120gig) and haven't had a problem yet -- and they are doing hardcore 1-5mb/sec transfer 24/7.

        k.
      • I had a nearly identical failure: I bought the WD120BB in March, and it failed in August. I reverted back to my old IBM 20GB Deskstar (which was supposed to be the failure-prone drive), and waited a month for my replacement which I can only hope is of higher quality (statistically).

        I've had many Caviar drives before this one that lasted for years, but I'm ditching this iffy drive for a Maxtor 320gig early next year - the warranty's for both may only be 1 year now, but I'd rather not have to deal with the hassle of a yearly RMA.

        --

    • I wouldn't lump the entire line of drives from a single company into a category of "Bad Drives." Western Digital has many flavors of drives for different applications. I've been using their top-of-the-line JB and BB series drives for the last few years under very strenious conditions in database servers and IDE RAID configurations and they have fared exceptionally well.

    • Re:Western Digital?? (Score:2, Informative)

      by gazbo ( 517111 )
      But then it is worth remembering that Mr. Gibson is an alarmist who talks an awful lot of self-indulgent crap.

      Remember, if he were to be believed the Intarweb would no longer exist due to non-superuser raw sockets in Windows XP. Oh, and he still has the "next generation" DDoS attack article up, detailing the next generation attack and his wonderous solution. Even though the problem had been encountered and solved many moons ago, the solution being far more comprehensive and elegant.

    • For the contrary viewpoint, I've been using WD drives for about 3 years for all my upgrades, and I haven't yet had a reliability problem with the disks. This is for 40G, 60G, 80G drives, consumer grade off the shelf from Best Buy or Micro Warehouse or whatever.

  • Obligatory SlashDotted Comment... (Score:4, Funny)

    by suss ( 158993 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:08PM (#4368924)
    I wonder what their server's harddisk temperature is right now... did they actually post this to slashdot on purpose?
  • Sadly, the site has been slashdotted into oblivion, so I need the help of those who have seen the site. I miss the cicada like whining of the drive from my old vaxstation, which drive would help bring back that sense of nostalgia? Also, extra heat output would be great since it is almost winter again here in the states.

  • Variable Speed? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by scott1853 ( 194884 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:11PM (#4368949)
    Why not develop a speedy drive that can slow itself down if it starts to generate too much heat or if it's not being used (as opposed to shutting it completely off)? I assume it's probably much easier to create a single speed motor than a variable speed one, but what would the disadvantages be?

    Of course there may not be any true advantages to such a thing either, although I tend to think that if could run about 4 times faster than normal for 10 second while it loads a single big file it might be worth it. There's also a chance that these alredy exist and I'm just out of the loop ;)
    • I see a couple of problems here. Not to say it can't be done, of course, but it's not going to be that easy:

      - Bit densities are getting so high that minor fluctuations in drive speed could cause all sorts of read/write errors.

      - All operating systems that I've ever used seem to hit the disk periodically during idle time. In order to get the benefit here, you'd have to have some threshold for activity before spinning up. However, that could be catastrophic for any kind of real-time app, like video encoding. Allowing the drive to spin down would limit the kinds of apps you could use.

      It's definitely an interesting idea, but I think it may fall into the causes-more-problems-than-it-solves category.

      Cheers
      -b

    • Re:Variable Speed? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Captain Morgan ( 160029 ) <[ude.ipw.mula] [ta] [nagromc]> on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:26PM (#4369058) Homepage
      Why not develop a speedy drive that can slow itself down if it starts to generate too much heat or if it's not being used (as opposed to shutting it completely off)? I assume it's probably much easier to create a single speed motor than a variable speed one, but what would the disadvantages be?

      The heads in your hard drive fly above the surface of the media due to the circulating air inside of the harddrive. Typically the heads are also engineered to fly at a specified height at all times given a specified amount of air moving through the drive. If you slowed the drive down the head would most likely fly lower or not fly at all, this would be quite bad for your data and the head.

      Hard drive spindle motors are variable speed and are typically servo controlled for speed. Adjusting the speed wouldn't be a big deal except for the above.
      • That's something that's always bugged me. Why is it that the heads are allowed enough flexibility to touch the heads in the first place? Why not make them rigid enough so they stay in a fixed location relative to the platter regardless of air movement?
        • That didn't come out right:

          "Why is it that the heads are allowed enough flexibility to touch the platters in the first place."

        • Probably because the head assembly needs to be nice and light for it to be flung across the platters in 10ms flat by a fairly cheap mechanism. There can't be much leeway to make it *that* rigid, given how close the heads fly over the platters.

          You might be ok under normal operation, but I'd really want all the airflow it can get when I crack my knee on the desk and shock the whole thing :)
        • That's something that's always bugged me. Why is it that the heads are allowed enough flexibility to touch the heads in the first place? Why not make them rigid enough so they stay in a fixed location relative to the platter regardless of air movement?

          Like other people have replied already, tolerances are the issue. The gap between the head and disk during operation of the drive is crazy small. The wobble in the spindle bearing is easily more than this gap, if your head was in a fixed position at one point it would be too far away from the surface to operate, at another it would be digging into the surface. The only real solution is to have it fly above the surface. If it flies too high then there won't be enough lift and it will fly lower, if it flies too low then there will be extra lift so it flies higher. It is a continuously adjusting system based on the flow of air in the drive and it certainly works quite well. I don't think any harddrive today could be built with a fixed height head, there just isn't enough precision in a device as large as a harddrive.

  • [Pun about thinking outside the box] (Score:3, Insightful)

    by back_pages ( 600753 ) <back_pages&cox,net> on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:14PM (#4368974) Journal
    I'm a complete amateur when it comes to case design, so this may be a moronic question. Nevertheless, I brazenly forge ahead.

    Has anyone built a case that wasn't made out of thin sheets of metal? What if you made a case filled with sound insulation such as styrofoam or eggshell foam, leaving only the air intake/exhaust vents exposed?

    Seems to me that so much money is being spent on making PC components quiet, presumably so we can nuzzle our faces next to the motherboard and take a nap, but why can't we just isolate the sound inside the box? It's my -novice- understanding of airflow design that little or no heat is dissipated by using a metal box; the heat is transfered through the moving air. Well, keep the air moving and soundproof the case.

    Is this a stupid idea? Maybe it's like my idea to make a solar powered, weather balloon lifted, permanently high altitude platform for launching space missions - a fool proof and economical plan for capitalist conquest! I just need to develop an attention span and find some fundin-- HEY! Something shiny!

    • One of the sources of noise in a computer is the exhaust fan on the power supply. Many ATX cases also have a secondary exhaust fan below the power supply on tower format cases. These fans are the loudest source of noise on most systems, though they are generally a constant source, so they are not likely to be as noticed.

      Because of the nature of sound, unless you build a noise canceling system around the powersupply and case exhaust fans, in addition to insulating your case, you are unlikely to significantly improve the noise around your system.

      You also need to consider that some souces of noise, for example a high speed CD-ROM drive are going to generate noise, and are not easily insulated, without taking out the necessary feature of being able to insert and remove CDs.

      For an entertainment center, you may want to custom build a case that has noise damping built in, as well as using slower speed hard drive and CD-Rom drives.

      But that's just my opinion, I've been wrong before.

      -Rusty
    • I've got a case in my living room that I use to access my mp3 server.

      I've replaced all the fans with Silencer fans (can't remember where I purchased them, but they were about 10 bucks a pop). I replaced the power supply fan with a silencer fan, added a second case fan, and changed the processor fan to a silencer fan - all rated at 26 dB, IIRC. I then added Dynamat [dynamat.com] to the inside of the case using their system. The machine is much quieter now. You can't hear the fans over the gentle gurgle of the fish tank nearby.

      For my mp3 server, I picked up 5 120 GB WD 5400 HDs from Frys ($99 a pop a few weeks ago) as well as the 3 fan bay coolers for each drive ($15 bucks a pop). I ran the system without the fans briefly, and the top drive was extremely hot. Using the Antec bay coolers, they are all much cooler to the touch. The machine makes a noticible hum, but it sits tucked away in a cool closet, so noise isn't much of an issue there. I was, however, surprised at how quiet the machine was even with all the bay fans (15 bay fans alone, then a power supply and two processor fans (dual proc system)). Laminar flow reduces noise...

  • I suppose more people should know about.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by spinkham ( 56603 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:17PM (#4368994)
    storagereview.com
    Huge database of very indepth reviews on hard drives. Scsi, ide, 5400-15000rpm.. Basically everything, with noise, temperature, and a few different benchmarks for different usage conditions.
    Definatly the best resource I've found for hard drive tests. I always consult this site before a hard drive purchase.

  • Heat production and power consumption. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:18PM (#4368997) Homepage Journal
    One thing that could be improved on many of these quantitative reviews is if they quit relying upon surface temperature probes (which is HORRIBLY unreliable. A slightly grainy texture would make the drive appear much cooler because of reduced heat transfer), and instead go right to the source: Power consumption. Is it so hard to measure the current on the 5 and 12V inputs, and deriving an actual power consumption metric for the drive? Not only is this valuable as it absolutely directly relates to heat, but it additionally is useful for those building low power rigs.

    Anyways, just a thought.

    • Drive manufacturers already provide this kind of information on the data sheets for their products. For example, the data sheet for the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV drives [seagate.com] says that the current draw for that drive is 2.8 amps @ 12 VDC and 1.2 amps @ 5 VDC (same numbers for all capacities). It even indicates the typical power consumption during seek, read/write, idle, and standby.

      Thus, as you can see, there's no need to stick an ammetre into the power leads when you can read a piece of paper (or a web page) to figure this stuff out.

      • Because I tried looking them up, and some manufacturers sound sane. Others do not. 5400 and 7200 rpm drawing the *same* power? 1, 2 and 3 platter disks drawing the same? WTF. Seriously, putting a simple ampmeter in there would be great data.

        Kjella

  • Forget everything else, try IBM 305 RAMAC (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:25PM (#4369051) Journal
    Earth, 1956 AC, IBM 305 RAMAC [cedmagic.com]:
    The 350 Disk File consisted of a stack of fifty 24" discs that can be seen to the left of the operator in the above picture [cedmagic.com]. The capacity of the entire disk file was 5 million 7-bit characters, which works out to about 4.4 MB in modern parlance. This is about the same capacity as the first personal computer hard drives that appeared in the early 1980's, but was an enormous capacity for 1956. IBM leased the 350 Disk File for a $35,000 annual fee.
  • I'm one of the growing number of people who have an entire TERABYTE -- yes, an entire TERABYTE of hard drives; 9 Western Digital Special Edition 120GB's, to be exact, for $1500 total.

    I've downloaded and installed EVERYTHING (6 different OS's, too) I can find and so far have used only about 800GB or so :)

    I'm glad they're starting to review noise as a factor, since with the extra cooling installed, the computer sounds almost like a vacuum cleaner, especially with the 550W power supply it takes to power the things. The drives individaully would be really quiet, but with all the cooling and such I have installed, it's almost as loud as this miniature fan I keep nearby.

    The fans drown out the crunching when people are grabbing everything off every hd on p2p programs, but all the noise is still worth it when I can call forth any song, music video, movie, or just about anything else at a whim.
    • When I saw you could get these for $150 at CompUSA (after all the rebates), that was the first thought in my head.

      Mind you, I didn't go there for lack of cash, but I did get two to set up a RAID configuration so my video editing would flyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

  • Speed = wrong direction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wolfier ( 94144 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:28PM (#4369072)
    Honestly - I do not feel the need of anything faster than the slowest 5400 RPM HDD for now - my PC has gobloads of RAM and I can make use 128MB-per-HDD as buffer. Easily.

    What worries me is, the faster you spin, the more catastrophic a failure is.

    What I DO care about, is reliability and shock resistance. If anyone sells a reliable HDD that would survive 5-inch drop and still operate with all my data intact, I'll buy it in a heartbeat.

    Compared to my data, the HDD and the theoretical time that can be saved with higher speed worth REALLY little. Almost nothing.
    • What you want is the Segate 4096, 80MB, 5-1/4" full height, MFM HDD. I had two of those monsters in my old NEC desktop and they lived through all kinds of crap. I accidently drpped one about tow-1/2 feet. It landed flat on it's bottom and ran like a champ for the next year I used that computer. These drives were absolute tanks! Slow as hell (by today's standards), loud as all get our and hot as the syn, but reliable as anything ever made.

    • What I DO care about, is reliability and shock resistance. If anyone sells a reliable HDD that would survive 5-inch drop and still operate with all my data intact, I'll buy it in a heartbeat.

      This is why I buy seagate. I transport my machine a lot, frequently in the back of pickup trucks. Last time I was moving it it came unmoored and did 3 or 4 cartwheels across the back of the truck and slammed into the other side. Other than some very very small dents and scratches it came through it fine. I had 3 HDs in there, all Seagate. They all worked fine when I powered the machine up later. I like Seagate because all of the drives I have from them have this neat rubber case kind of thing around the. It really does seem to help when you are rough on your HDs.

      Kintanon

  • Why no RAM -- IDE Devices? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by affegott ( 104661 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:33PM (#4369102)
    Why hasn't anyone developed a device that has DIMM slots for PCXXXX RAM and an IDE/Firewire/USB interface on it?

    Seems like that would be the way to go... stick a battery on it, and give it an external power supply... then you have VERY fast and extremely reliable storage. (As long as it is powered).

    I have had enough hard drives fail that I would love to have one... maybe once MRAM comes out these devices will start popping up.

    Ryan

    • Re:Why no RAM -- IDE Devices? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ptudor ( 22537 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @02:56PM (#4369252) Homepage Journal
      Platypus Technology [platypus.net] does make something similar. They have both internal PCI and external enclosures to just hold sticks of ram; some models have stadard hard drives for times of power loss. Unfortunately under linux it requires a kernel module (and at the time I was using them, if I upgraded the kernel the company had to compile a new module to match). They fly though, they're sooo fast. Really nice for my mail queues.
      • What's the damage on one of those... they look expensive.

        The PCI interface is nice, but IDE would be cooler... only because it could use a regular IDE driver...

        Those cards do look REALLY nice...
    • Good idea, but once you implement it, be sure to benchmark it:

      I had a PostreSQL database that was acting a bit slow on a FreeBSD box - and I had the bright idea: Hey! It must be the hard-drive that's holding the things up. So I created a file system in memory and put my PostgreSQL databse in the memory based 'disk.'

      My fstab: /dev/ad0s1b /nbt/mfs mfs rw,-s131072 0 0

      Imagine my suprise when over a four minute benchmarking session, the memory based disk only shaved off two seconds!

      The moral of the story - if you have a good operating system (not Windows), then the added memory is probably better used by the computer itself than by creating a memory based disk. Modern OS do a great job of caching things.

      If you have a sucky OS - like Windows, than this doesen't apply.

      • Speed isn't my biggest concern... it is reliability. HD are one of last mechanical parts of the PC left... it would be nice to kiss the mechanical part good bye...
        • Speed isn't my biggest concern... it is reliability. HD are one of last mechanical parts of the PC left... it would be nice to kiss the mechanical part good bye..

          Another thing to consider, and it may be an urban legand, is that apparently cosmic rays have enough enrgy to randomly twiddle a bit in RAM. This problem is agrivated by the lower voltages used in moder memory as well a density. I've heard that you can expect one bit change per month per 128 megs at low altitude.

          • This is NOT an urban legend, and is much of the reason for ECC ram and using older computers on the space shuttle. For more info look into the background of IBM's chipkill memory moduls, one of their white papers lists research IBM has done going back to before the PC on the effects of cosmic rays on integrated circuits.
      • If you have a sucky OS - like Windows, than this doesen't apply.

        Have you benchmarked this with a Windows OS, or are you just taking an unfounded cheap shot at Microsoft?

        I can't vouch for Windows' memory mapping model myself, but without supporting evidence your comment seems to be little more than "UNIX ROX, WINBLOWS SUX"
    • Why hasn't anyone developed a device that has DIMM slots for PCXXXX RAM and an IDE/Firewire/USB interface on it?

      Probably because hard drives (ide, anyway) cost about a buck a gigabyte. SDRAM costs about a buck a megabyte; maybe a little more once you add a power supply and an interface. But, look here [thinkgeek.com] and here [thinkgeek.com] . The first is pretty much what you're looking for, I think, and the second is a bit more cost effective.

  • Page One (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IntroductionBy: Sander Sassen

    A modern harddisk is not that different, mechanically, from the first generation of harddisks that debuted with the IBM PC in the '80s. Today's harddisks are also mechanical parts that use spinning platters and read/write heads to store or read information from them. That also explains why harddisks haven't seen the rapid pace of innovation as for example CPUs have; simply because the mechanics are holding the harddisk back from making similar leaps in performance. But to be honest that's not entirely accurate, modern harddisks could be substantially faster, but not without either driving up the price significantly or introducing unwanted side effects.

    One of these side effects is excessive noise; because a harddisk has a number of spinning and moving parts it is virtually impossible to make a harddisk noiseless. Anything you'll do to counter the noise will either influence the performance, drive up the price, or make the harddisk physically larger. For example one way to reduce the noise would be to reduce the rpm of the platters which would mean we'd end up with a slower harddisk overall. And vice versa, by increasing the rpm of the platters we'll get a better performing harddisk but the noise level will also increase.

    Naturally we could counter the noise production by adding sound insulation. Unfortunately insulation is not the preferred way of tackling the noise production as it'll make the harddisk physically larger, and thus leave less room for storage capacity. Furthermore it also works as an insulator for the heat produced by the harddisk, which would then cut into the harddisk's MTBF, Mean Time Before Failure. That actually brings us to the second unwanted side effect of high-performance harddisks and that's excessive heat production.

    Modern IDE harddisks feature platters that revolve at either 5400 or 7200-rpm and thus revolve at about half the speed of the fastest SCSI harddisks that top out at 15.000-rpm. The main difference is that these SCSI harddisks are used in professional applications such as database servers where noise- and heat production are second to performance, and thus these levels are substantially higher than consumer level products. In consumer level PCs however heat production is becoming an increasingly important issue. PCs continue to get smaller and CPUs on average dissipate more than 50-watts of heat, so the system temperature will rise significantly if a harddisk is mounted with excessive heat production. In the following pages we'll take a look at all recent 5400 and 7200-rpm harddisks from IBM, Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung with a focus on noise and heat production as well as overall performance.
    Next >>
  • "[7200 rpm disks] are generally too costly, or a bit overkill, for mundane office applications such as word processing or sending emails"

    I'm having enough trouble just finding 5400 rpm disks. The performance (speed-wise) is more than enough for me, and I'd rather go with cool and quiet. The cost difference between 5400 and 7200 drives is marginal (a few bucks).
    The thing is, there aren't many 5400 rpm disks around anymore and only sizes up to 80 GB. I'd rather have one big disk than two or three small ones (both heat and noise adds up), but I can't find any 5400 rpm disks at, say, 120GB or so, while 7200 rpm disks are available up to 200GB or so. And as long as the 7200 rpm drives are as hot and noisy as they are, I would rather have 5400 rpm disks.
    Perhaps there are larger 5400 rpm disks, but I have yet to see them at any reseller nearby.
  • ....when the sounds of IBM's 20MB drive reading or writing could be felt in your teeth...

    Ahh, those were the days.
  • ...I was just there, and have ordered a shiny new WD800JB based on this review [storagereview.com].

    And they include heat and noise reports in their excellent reviews. Highly recommended for any HDD purchase.

  • Quiet computing tips (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cervantes ( 612861 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:24PM (#4369486) Journal
    After years of doing custom case mods, here's a few tips I've used over the years to make quieter computers:

    {* Disclaimer - if you accidentally duct tape your CPU fan and your PSU inlets, please try and smother the flames with your body because (1) No one else should be hurt because of your "specialness", and (2) You'll be doing all of us a favour. Either way, don't blame me. *}

    The easiest fix: Take some foam padding, preferably the antistatic kind that most hardware ships in these days, and line your case panels with a layer or two. It'll cut down on a good portion of the noise, and it'll improve your airflow (you didn't really think that air was supposed to go through those decorative holes, did you?) Be sure to keep it thin on the back side, next to the mobo. I know it says antistatic on the box, but do you really want anything touching your mobo?

    Next, replace your damn PSU. Standard ones are way too damn noisy. I don't have any links handy (I'm at work), but they are plentiful and easy to find. Oh, and say "damn" alot. It helps.

    Getting more in-depth, remove your peripheral drives (CD, HD, etc), and put them back in with rubber washers both between the drive and case, and between the screw and case. It cuts down on vibrations significantly.

    Tie up your loose cables. Sounds silly, but I've found that in several systems with significant airflow, they were either moving around or causing turbulence. Either make or buy rounded IDE cables for the best flow.

    If you have a very noisy harddrive, yank it from that small and normally loose 3 1/2" bracket and put it in one of your 5 1/4" bays with the help of drive brackets. Insulate around it with antistatic foam padding, use rubber washers, put an ultraquiet mini fan behind it, set to pull air(that old socket 7 fan you have lying around will do just fine). Finally, remove the bezel in front of it, drill some small holes for airflow, insulate with foam padding (remove the padding around the holes ((yes, it is sad that I have to point that out)) ), and pop it back in. Voila! Thicker padding to cut down on sound, it's in the 5 1/4" drive section, which I find is much sturdier and less prone to rattle, and the fan will keep it cooler than it would have been before.

    Consider dropping that 52x CD. Sure, it's impressive, but you install all your games with max install, right? (right??) Or better yet, go buy software that will copy your CD to the HD and then subst the directory to a drive letter. Voila! CD at HD speeds. Replace the 52 with something more conservative, and you'll notice a big difference (and lower spinup time)

    crud, "subst", I just dated myself...

    Consider spring-mount screws for your case fans. I have a whole bag of them, but I'll be darned if I can remember who made them. They're basically just a short metal or plastic spring with a screw at each end. One end screws into the hole on the fan, the other into the case, voila, instant buffer against vibrations.

    If things are still too bad for you, consider an external case mod. The quietest I ever did was to replace all of the metal panels on the case with 1/2" beechwood (damn, but it was pretty), but not all of us have the time and patience to work up something like that. The easiest is to take your panels off, and slap some starch/water paste on them. Next, take some thick cloth (or a few layers of thin cloth, if you feel the need to be difficult), load it up with the paste, and then just slap it on your panel. Make sure it's all wrinkly and folded n' chit. Let it dry, and the cloth should stick on just fine, adding another layer of sound barrier for ya. DISCLAIMER 1: This has been known not to stick on some of the new, shiny, smooth cases. DISCLAIMER 2: Take the panels off of your PC BEFORE you start slathering them with starch. Or, at the very least, remember to turn your PC off first. ;-)

    Finally, try putting your PC on a phone book or something similar. Sounds silly, but it dulls the noise that resonates into the floor/desk. If it makes a difference for you, then build something more permanant for your case to sit on (or, at the very least, give it some ultracool extra-long legs like the AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars.... complete with little lazer guns on the CD drive... )

    Lastly, note that a heckuvalot of the noise you hear could be from your monitor, too. But I will avoid monitor mods for today, lest some yahoo stick a phillips through his tube and show up at my doorstep, ready to share the tale. (it's happened, and I swear he was still smoking).

    Hope this helps!

  • What is it with these rpm speeds? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by debest ( 471937 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:25PM (#4369503)
    Why is it that all of these manufacturers use the same 5400 and 7200 rpm speeds for their drives? Why couldn't one manufacturer put out their drives at, say, 6000 and 8000 rpm (from a marketing standpoint, this would be beneficial: kind of like Intel using MHz as a benchmark for comparative "performance" against AMD).

    Is there a good reason for this uniformity across manufacturers? Do they use the same motors from a 3rd party supplier? What gives?

    • Re:What is it with these rpm speeds? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      no. the speed on the head flying across the disks to grab and write data are precisely calculated with lots of painful calculations. to get a 6000 rpm drive they would have to go thru all that again, find a vendor selling 6000 rpm drive motors & recreate the ASIC where those calculations are stored instead of buying it off the shelf.

  • Buyer Beware (Score:3, Informative)

    by eclectro ( 227083 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:43PM (#4369590)
    The most quiet drives, the seagate Barracuda IV atas have a problem in Raid configurations. When used in a Raid configuration, the performance is less than a single drive by itself. Raid is not officially supported by this drive. More here [viaarena.com].

    • Re:Buyer Beware (Score:2, Informative)

      by entrigant ( 233266 )
      Evidently, when the drive is used in some RAID 0 environments, it can supply data to the interface faster than the host system can request it. Under some circumstances, such as reading sequential data, this can cause the drive to incur a latency. (Emphasis mine)

      Please be more thorough when posting FUD. You are correct in that chances are if you use these drives with your $35 Promise (which never have been known for their stellar raid performance) fastrack software based controller slowness will happen. However this is not a set in stone problem for all possible RAID configurations under the sun. In fact iirc Adaptec use to offer a deal with their 2400A IDE RAID5 controller a few months ago. Buy the controller get some discounted Barracuda IV drives. In fact those drives work great with that controller... I should know, I use that combination. Few things in life annoy me as much as FUD with no thought behind it...

  • Mirror (Score:3, Informative)

    by Door-opening Fascist ( 534466 ) <skylar@cs.earlham.edu> on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:46PM (#4369612) Homepage

    Since things seem to be getting bogged down on Hardware Analysis's [hardwareanalysis.com] end, here are two mirrors:

    1. Earlham College [earlham.edu]

    2. UW-Madison [wisc.edu]

    These are in PDF format, which I converted from the printable HTML provided on the website. It is missing one eye-candy picture of a hard-drive's interior.

  • Frequency is as important as power (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ez76 ( 322080 ) <(slashdot) (at) (e76.us)> on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @04:13PM (#4369843) Homepage
    Something I am surprised nobody has brought up yet is that the frequency of noise which a drive produces is as important (if not more) than the absolute sound pressure level of the noise.

    Human ears are more sensitive to midrange sounds and high-frequency noise tends to be more grating than lower frequency "whooshes" at the same sound pressure level.

    Much like higher revving engines, higher RPM drives naturally produce higher-frequency noise, so 37dB on a 15k RPM drive (e.g. newest Seagate Cheetah) will typically be more noticeable than 37dB on a 7200rpm drive (older IBM 75GXP drives).

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