Juggy
Executive Member
What is the quietest, coolest HDD you get? I need a 2TB jobbie for my media player.
Being cooler is more important that quiet to me.
Being cooler is more important that quiet to me.
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HDD Advice
- Thread starter Juggy
- Start date
PostmanPot
Honorary Master
So basically between Samsung EcoGreen 5400RPM, WD Green, and Seagate LP.
In my experience, Samsungs have been the coolest.
Maybe they hacked the temperature sensor.
In my experience, Samsungs have been the coolest.
Maybe they hacked the temperature sensor.
Re83L
Expert Member
Samsung F4 2TB
I think Esquire sells them for R679, but they have no stock in CT.
I have a WD Green 1.5TB, a Seagate 1.5TB and three Samsung F4s, the F4's copy @ around 55-70MB/s and doesn't even get hot to the touch (I recently copied 1.8TB overnight in my HDD toaster, and the drive was quieter and cooler than any of my other drives, including my Samsung F3)
I think Esquire sells them for R679, but they have no stock in CT.
I have a WD Green 1.5TB, a Seagate 1.5TB and three Samsung F4s, the F4's copy @ around 55-70MB/s and doesn't even get hot to the touch (I recently copied 1.8TB overnight in my HDD toaster, and the drive was quieter and cooler than any of my other drives, including my Samsung F3)
Juggy
Executive Member
Interesting, thanks guys. I have the WD Green 1.5TB and it gets so hot I can't even hold it when it's been running in my media player for more than 30 minutes.
I think Sahara do Samsung as well, I'll get one from them.
Thanks again
I think Sahara do Samsung as well, I'll get one from them.
Thanks again
Juggy
Executive Member
Well that sucks, Sahara have the F2 1.5 and the F3 2.0 so I will wait until Esquire have stock.
Juggy
Executive Member
I've just ordered from Esquire in Milnerton. They're getting the stock from Midrand and will be here on Monday/Tuesday.
R649 ex vat
R649 ex vat
I've personally owned these 3:
Seagate LP 2TB (ST32000542AS) - Have 6, used in my NAS
Samsung EcoGreen 2TB (HD204UI) - Had 4, was for someone else
Western Digital Green Power 2TB (WD20EARS) - Had 4, sold because I couldn't use them in my NAS because of 4kb sector size issue
Of all of those the coolest and quietest was the Western Digital GP but it is also the most expensive. My experiences are based on the logs from FreeNAS (it monitors HD health and temperature using SMART). Noise was based on my own observations.
NOTE: WD20EARS and HD204UI are 4kb sector size drives. If you don't know what that means I STRONGLY suggest you see this. The performance of an advanced format drive if the partition is not aligned correctly is incredibly slow during writes (A value of 1.00 means no penalty; higher values mean worse performance) (I got around 4mb/s write during personal testing in Windows 7) and reads depend on the file system but will usually suffer less. Original article here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/l...disks/index.html?ca=dgr-lnxw074KB-Disksdth-LX
R100 says that 95% of the Media Players don't support advanced format drives and cannot align the partition correctly.
Seagate LP 2TB (ST32000542AS) - Have 6, used in my NAS
Samsung EcoGreen 2TB (HD204UI) - Had 4, was for someone else
Western Digital Green Power 2TB (WD20EARS) - Had 4, sold because I couldn't use them in my NAS because of 4kb sector size issue
Of all of those the coolest and quietest was the Western Digital GP but it is also the most expensive. My experiences are based on the logs from FreeNAS (it monitors HD health and temperature using SMART). Noise was based on my own observations.
NOTE: WD20EARS and HD204UI are 4kb sector size drives. If you don't know what that means I STRONGLY suggest you see this. The performance of an advanced format drive if the partition is not aligned correctly is incredibly slow during writes (A value of 1.00 means no penalty; higher values mean worse performance) (I got around 4mb/s write during personal testing in Windows 7) and reads depend on the file system but will usually suffer less. Original article here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/l...disks/index.html?ca=dgr-lnxw074KB-Disksdth-LX
R100 says that 95% of the Media Players don't support advanced format drives and cannot align the partition correctly.
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Juggy
Executive Member
Thanks Gnome, do you think the Sammy F4 will be ok?
Re83L
Expert Member
Wow Gnome..
I have to say I really was so impressed with my first F4 that I bought another two, seeing that it copied around 70MB/s continously without getting hot to the touch at all.
I will try an F4 2TB in my Mede8er and see if I can detect any issues, currently have a WD 1.5TB in there.
I have to say I really was so impressed with my first F4 that I bought another two, seeing that it copied around 70MB/s continously without getting hot to the touch at all.
I will try an F4 2TB in my Mede8er and see if I can detect any issues, currently have a WD 1.5TB in there.
Well if you make the partition correctly then it won't be a problem. Surely most media player just use standard file systems? Just use the advice from the above IBM link to create a partition or Windows 7.
Remember not all of them are advanced format. For example Esquire used to sell the non-Advanced Format drives. Would be interesting to see if Mede8er supports creating an aligned partition. Even if it doesn't, so long as they use a standard partition type you can recreate the partition on a PC and align it correctly. The IBM guide I posted above explains the situation, performance implications and how to create a properly aligned partition pretty well.
On Windows it can be done using diskpart and just set the offset to 1024kb. But Windows 7 will only allow GPT or NTFS for a drive that size anyway.
Btw. doesn't harm the drive it just reduces performance if not aligned. The Wikipedia article explains why fairly well (Read-Modify-Write).
The problem only really becomes very complicated when you do RAID, hence the reason I sold my 4kb sector size drives when I bought some for a NAS. In RAID there isn't really a solution most of the time.
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LazyLion
King of de Jungle
WD Greenpower are pretty cool and quiet, but I have had a very high failure rate with those drives 
WD Greenpower are pretty cool and quiet, but I have had a very high failure rate with those drives
The guys at Blackblaze did reliability tests before settling on the 1.5TB Seagates as the WD & Samsung drives did not fare to well, the 2TB Seagates were also problematic from what I recall. Trying to find the blog/article as reference.
LazyLion
King of de Jungle
That has also been my experience.
Juggy
Executive Member
Interesting, I have removed the 1.5 Green from my Media Player and installed a 1TB Seagate 7200.12 and there is barely any heat at all after 2 hours of movie watching.
Very interesting, could this 4k cluster whatever it is have something to do with the heat? Disk scanning or working overtime and underperforming causing unecessary heat?
Very interesting, could this 4k cluster whatever it is have something to do with the heat? Disk scanning or working overtime and underperforming causing unecessary heat?
Great read, Gnome; thanks!
And dude... You have a major hard drive fetish
Hehe, I have a lot of stuff to store
Don't have that many anymore tho, just the 6x2TB. But yeah getting to that I learned quite a bit along the way. I wouldn't say I'm an expert but I sure do know my way around Linux/FreeBSD/OpenSolaris/Windows now when it comes to partitions, file systems and hard-drives