Best silent PATA/ATA100 2.5 Hard Drives

Hi i was wondering what is the best silent 5400RPM hard drive?
I have upgraded from a 60GB 4200RPM Fuji drive that was really completely silent and i am now using a perpendicular Seagate 5400.3 HD which is not as silent. I sometimes can hear a faint hiss but overall it is not a loud drive at all and it is still relatively pretty silent. I think that i maybe a little noise sensitive as well.

I am debating about replacing the 5400RPM HD and putting it in another computer and getting a larger 5400RPM HD but i want one that is really quite silent. Can anybody recommend some models for me?


Thanks

 

Consider the Samsung HDDs. I've got the HM160JI and it is quiet except for a slight hum. There is negligible head noise by design. To quote from this press release:

I also reckon that it runs slightly cooler than the 120GB Seagate which it replaced. Fujitsu's are probably the next quietest. If you need more than 160GB, Samsung now have a 250GB 5400prm HDD coming off the production find, although they may be hard to find for the next few months.

John

 

fujitsus usually aren't the best performers, but they are very quiet. i never hear any noise from my fujitsu drive. you may want to avoid hitachi though. they have great drive performance, but usually at the sacrifice of noise. you can also check out this website for more information:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article29-page1.html

 

Thank you for your replies. So it is a toss up between the Samsung and a Fujistu drive for me. I will read online reviews about both of these models to help me decide which one to get.

I am willing to give up a slightly faster perpendicular drive for a really silent one.

 

I vote for Seagate.

regards.

John.

 

PLEASE do yourself a favour and check into Seagate drives. I speak mainly from desktop experience but having tried IBM, Seagate, WD, and Maxtor I would lean towards Seagate when buying any hard drive, whether for Desktop or Notebook. Do a search for quiet/silent drives and you should see a pattern.

 

I replaced my stock Hitachi 4200 rpm hdd with a 7200 rpm Seagate and the Seagate is by far more quiet than the hitachi was. I would go to newegg and search each of the hdd's you are considering. I did such before buying my Seagate and couldn't be happier.

Leon

 

I went with WD's in the end and bought this drive WD1200VE. I read good things about Western Digital making very quiet HD's and they claimed that the HD that i got was the most quiet 2.5 HD on the market so how could i resist?
This is the blurb that i read on the site where i bought it-

"WD Scorpio delivers best-in-class performance with low power requirements comparable to much slower notebook drives. In addition, you'll get the quietest 2.5-inch drive on the market with real-time data protection technology to help keep your data safe. "

The above is quite a claim i am a little disappointed actually by this HD. It is as not as quiet as i imagined it was going to be. On the WD website they gave this HD a 20 idle score and a 21 seek score. At times the HD is not inaudible to me. I can hear it cluncking or doing whatever it does lol. Relatively speaking this HD is not loud and the noise is not constant but it is not quite what i was looking for i find hearing the noise a bit distracting and irritating.
I am thinking that i may have got a defective HD or maybe they are meant to be like that?
I have used Toshiba HD's a few years ago and i found that they were pretty good i may consider getting one of those again.

I paid money to have the drive fitted as my laptop is still in warranty and i wanted an invoice to prove that an official repair centre installed my HD. I may live with this HD for a while but if my laptop develops a fault i may buy another HD and ask them to install it for me again in the future as they will have the laptop open anyway maybe i won't get charged to much or nothing for the installation.

 

I have found WD desktop drives to be noisier than the Seagate drives. Generally you will find recommendations for Seagate if you are looking for a quiet drive. I've got an 80 GB 7200 RPM drive in my HP NC8340 and I honestly rarely notice any drive noise, just the exhaust fan intermittently.

Other than fan noise you also need to consider the build of the laptop a drive is installed in. Is it "shock mounted", is there sufficient material surrounding the drive to reduce sound coming from the drive or is it just a thin piece of plastic that separates the drive from your ears? If I place the laptop up to my ears I can hear the drive spinning (ever so quietly).

Until we get solid state hard drives (at reasonable prices and capacities) you will have to deal with some amount of noise from the drive.

 

Since my previous post in this thread I came across a review of the latest WD 2.5" HDD at Digit Life. It seems that WD lost the plot on this one.

On the other hand, I put a Samsung HM160JC into my Q35 to replace a Hitachi HDD because I need more space. Apart from being quieter, it seems I can get at least about 5% more battery run time.

John

 

The WD can be best described as having a click noise. From reading around the net and on the WD site i am not alone in having this problem. It seems to be a quite common problem with WD HD's. There is a Dell Firmware patch for this but i am using a Mac and a larger capacity HD so i doubt that it would work for me. I have no intention of removing the HD right now and formatting it in a PC.
Maybe WD will bring out a FW patch for this. I really hope that they do because other than the clicking it would be perfect.

I have been happy with some previous HD's i was happy with the Seagate Sata 5400 HD's that i had in a MacBook Pro and i heard virtually no noise for them. The 5400.3 IDE drive that i got for my iBook was unfortunately not as good.
The Toshiba 5400 HD's that i had in my PC notebooks were also fine but i have been reading on the net they are not really that great anymore.

 

Though my laptop's Fujitsu is ultra quiet, personally given the choice I would not look beyond Seagate. I've recently bought 2x Seagate drives to make portable drives out of them and they are beautifully quiet as well

At home we had 5 externals. We now have 4. Over a couple of years, out of 3x Seagate, 1x Hitachi and 1x WD, only one failed

Lets just say you won't find me for one buying WD. Ever.

 

That's funny, I have found the exact opposite in my machine. I replaced a 30gig Hitachi Travelstar in my Dell D505 with a Seagate 7200.1 ST910021A 100gig.
The Hitachi that came out was virtually silent. I only noticed noise coming from my machine when the fan would kick in due to some intensive processor action. The minute I jammed the Seagate in, I noticed a noise. Not seek noise, but a constant drive spinning noise.
It has been driving me insane for 7 months to the point where I am looking to upgrade just to go back to a silent drive. Reading specs gets you nowhere. And now reading reviews gets you nowhere either.
I did purchase a Western Digital WD1200BEVE oem drive and it did run a good bit quieter than the Seagate. However, after hearing some negative reviews concerning the WD, I am looking to return the drive.
My question is, do I have a defective Seagate? I can hear the drive spinning (idling) from 10 feet away.