Quietest Mechanical harddrive

Hi, i'm looking for the quietest MECHANICAL harddrive so please dont recommend any SSDs (too poor for that stuff).

i was looking through the hitachi 7k500, WD scorpio blue. The harddrive that i will be getting is a seagate 5400.6, stock on the asus ul30vt-a1.

 

Is space a concern? If not, look for a single platter drive, such as the WD Blue 320GB drive.

 

I have this drive, and its quite. in a 100% quite room, you have to listen to hear it.

 

I think the notebook plays a role as well. The 500GB I have in my X200 now was very quiet in my R60, but it more noisy in the X200. If I'm listening to music I don't hear it much, but if I'm in a quiet room it's more audible.

 

thanks, and no space is not a concern as long it is over 120gb. is the WD blue 320gb 5400rpms or 7200rpms?

the hard drive model number u are referring to would be WD3200BEVT ?

 

yup that should be the model number but if u want space and performance , 500GB Hitachi 7K500 is ur best option... most ppl found it quiet... and very fast..

 

mm ok i might actually get the hitachi 7k500. is there a smaller version of it with the same performance? i dont think i need 500gbs.

edit: oh i found it. is it 7k320? it looks like its 4th generation while the 7k500 is fifth gen. does that make a difference in technology?

 

Yes, the 7K320 was the previous generation to the current 7K500. The 7K500 does also come in other sizes, it's just that most people tend to like to go for the highest capacity. The 7K500 also comes in 400, 320, 250, 160, and 120 GB models ( http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/products/travelstar/7K500/).

 

Most Seagates are very quiet.

So is the WD Black Edition, it's only audible with my ear to the laptop or right next to it when it is thrashing.

 

Based on my experience with the following three drives:
-Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB (WD5000BEVT)
-Seagate 7200.4 320GB (ST9320423AS)
-Seagate 7200.4 500GB (ST9500420AS)
-Hitachi 7K500 500GB (HTS725050A9A364)

The WD is the quietest - literally inaudible, even with my ear a few inches away; note it is a 5400RPM drive.
The Seagate 7200.4 drives are both quite noisy . . . not so much in reading/writing, but they have a high level of vibration and the sound of the platters spinning is very distinct next to the Hitachi 7K500, which is very quiet by comparison. The Seagate 7200.4 series in general is unimpressive; in addition to the noise/vibration issues, it has lackluster performance next to Western Digital's and Hitachi's 7200RPM drives. I would avoid them.

Fujitsu 5400RPM drives are generally very quiet, especially the single-platter models, though ever since Fujitsu's hard drive division was bought they are increasingly difficult to find.

I would go for a WD Scorpio Blue if you want a very quiet drive, or for much better performance and a slight increase in noise level, the Hitachi 7K500.

 

Thanks for the detailed report. I just opened my current laptop (HP dv2911us) and discovered that the hhd is hitachi 5k250-250 (probably means 250gbs). it runs at 5400rpms. My new laptop (asus ul30vt-a1) is arriving tomrrow and i want to do a clean install and etc. In the owner's lounge, many people complain about the noisy seagate, so i wanted to replace it, hence this thread. anyways, currently, this harddrive (5k250) makes loud woooooshing sounds and its really annoying sitting in a lecture hall while eveyrone around you is like . It doesnt happen all the time but randomly and occasionally. there is also an audible clicking sound. theres also a soft woosh, which kinda sounds like the platters are spinning really fast and then slowing down, and then it continues and repeats (happens most of the time the harddrive is on). the last and major problem of this harddrive is the fact that it is so damn hot.

so in lieu of this information, does the hitachi 7k500 do this as well? does the wd scropio blue do this too?

 

The WD Scorpio Blue is a 5400RPM drive and the ambient noise level of the platters spinning is not very distinct. It is nearly silent in reading/writing - no real clicking sound. If I had to guess I would say the 7K500 is 20% noisier. Even in a quiet room though I have trouble hearing it and I highly doubt anyone around could even hear it. I can't say the same about the Seagate 7200.4 I replaced . . . that I could hear from a good distance away. The motors used in the Seagate 7200.4 drives are not as good of quality as the ones used by WD/Hitachi. A good indicator of this is how much vibration and ambient noise the Seagates have by comparison.

Those sounds you are hearing from your current drive may be because of it spinning up/down. By default, Windows powers down your hard drive after a certain period of inactivity to save power. I do not like Windows doing that for a few reasons:
a) increased power consumption. At startup, my Hitachi 7K500 uses 4.7W of power where running at idle it only uses 0.89W. If the drive is spinning up and down often it may be wasting more power than it is saving.
b) reliability. Theoretically the hard drive's motor should be able to power up/down thousands of times; I don't like to eat into that number any more than I have to so I have my hard drives set to never turn off, even on battery. You can change this setting; go into Control Panel (icon view), Power Options, change plan settings, then advanced power settings. Expand the hard disk section and set it to 0 (never). Click OK then save changes.
An added benefit of never having your drive turn off is increased performance. If your hard drive is powered down and a program wants to do a read/write operation, it has to wait for the drive to spin up which takes a few seconds.

The hard drive's temperature largely depends on the laptop . . . mobile hard drives are typically rated for 55*C; ideally it should run below 50*C at idle so you have some thermal cushion for read/writes, which increase heat. The hard drive compartment in my HP notebook is well ventilated and my 7K500 stays in the 34-37*C range.

Attached are some CrystalMark numbers I ran for the Hitachi 7K500 (left) and the WD Scorpio Blue 500GB (right). The Hitachi is significantly faster in everyday use.

 

excellent! thanks so much. ill go for the hitachi 7k500 then. i dont know whats wrong with my laptop then :/ my roommate's hp dv7 or dv something dont remember but it was one of those special edition versions, gets really hot as well. but thats okay, with my new ul30vt-a1, there is no need for a laptop cooler! thanks again.

 

How exactly is the Hitachi significantly faster? It only has faster sequential speeds. O/S and program loading relies mostly on random R/W, where the numbers aren't very different. The only thing that would make it faster is the lower access time (which isn't shown here), but even then I wouldn't call it significantly faster (until you reach SSD level). Sorry, I didn't reply before but the model is actually: WD3200BPVT. This should be the newer single platter version of the WD Blue drive and this should be quieter than any of the 2 platter drives above (since you mentioned that capacity isn't a concern) - and it should be faster than the WD 500GB drive.

 

That's interesting. My 7200.4 was near silent in my R60, but when I moved it over to my X200, it was much louder. The X is a thinner machine. That may play a role. My desktop WD is very loud when reading/writing, but the Seagate it replaced is was very quiet. Some of it's just luck of the Irish I think.

It really depends on what you're doing. Anything with heavy throughput on the drive, the Hitachi will have an advantage, but I'd say typical usage doesn't involve that, so the drives will perform similarly in real world usage. I've had both drives. I couldn't tell much of a difference between them.

 

I have used both drives in my notebook; I cloned them over so I was using the exact same image. The Hitachi drive was far faster when multiple programs were requesting read/write operations i.e. logging on. The Hitachi 7K500 logged on in a matter of seconds while the WD Blue would sit there and hammer away for several times as long. In that type of situation where the hard drive/storage device will be the performance bottleneck, a 5400RPM simply can't keep up with a 7200RPM. The average latency of a 7200RPM drive is much lower.

A good illustration of this: StorageMark 2010
HTPC Disk Capture test (playing one 720P HD movie in Media Player Classic, one 480P SD movie playing in VLC, three movies downloading simultaneously through iTunes, and one 1080i HDTV stream being recorded through Windows Media Center over a 15 minute period):

MB/s
7K500: 21.76
WD Blue 640GB: 13.68

IOps
7K500: 476.22
WD Blue 640GB: 299.46

Average Latency (ms)
7K500: 16.77
WD Blue 640GB: 26.08

Big difference; the WD 640GB Blue I used is faster than the 500GB version.

In some situations there will be little difference between a Blue and a 7K500. But in the situations where the disk is being thrashed, the 7K500 will pull ahead by a significant margin.

 

There is a 250GB or 320GB version of the 7K500 if u don't need that much space...