Quiet harddrive

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frenchi6625

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I'm a Seagate fan, and have been using them for ages, but I'm wondering if you guys can suggest a really quiet drive. I'm trying to get the noise levels down as low as possible.

Thanks, and happy holidays to y'all.
 
I got a Barracuda ST3200827AS recently... and it's bloody noisy :mad:

I can't recommend any Seagate's...
But don't make the same mistake I made, make sure it supports AAM

I can't seem to enable AAM, don't think it supports it
(I had a WD Caviar before...incredibly quite... so the Seagate is a bit disappointing)

Best thing about Seagate is idle noise(amazingly silent)

**I'm defragmenting right now and its grinding away :mad:**

Edit: Are you looking for a SATA or PATA/IDE drive?
If IDE ignore my post above

Happy Holidays!
 
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IDE of seagate is dead quite, the sata's are way louder. The sata is just loud when you're accessing, the ide one can barely be heard. Both are very soft when idling.
 
thanks for the advice

looks like a completely silent rig will cost an arm and two legs.
 
hrm.. what about putting the computer in another room and getting some long VGA and USB cables? :p

just mah 2 cents ;)
 
frenchi6625 said:
looks like a completely silent rig will cost an arm and two legs.
Click to expand...
Quite. But an at least substantially quiet one may cost you rather a lot less in terms of things like carpet tiles/foam rubber/empty egg crates! The point of the exercise being to absorb and dampen the sound before it escapes the box and ruins your day... :cool:
 
bullfrog said:
IDE of seagate is dead quite, the sata's are way louder. The sata is just loud when you're accessing, the ide one can barely be heard. Both are very soft when idling.
Click to expand...

I have a Seagate IDE and SATA drive and both are quiet. Don't know if it is the case or if the drives are quiet, but the only noise I have is the power supply fan.
 
Vampir0 said:
I have a Seagate IDE and SATA drive and both are quiet. Don't know if it is the case or if the drives are quiet, but the only noise I have is the power supply fan.
Click to expand...

Might be a different drive or the case. The thing is that my case is open and I have one ide and one sata. The sata is fine when you copy files to and from it but is loud with random access. So if the arm inside moves around a lot you can hear it very clearly. It's loud when you doing a virus scan or search on the sata drive, a loud crrrr'ing noise. The ide one on the other hand is dead quite during all of this.

It might also be that you can't hear it with your case, possibly cause it's closed? Open up the case and do a search on both drives and compare, you might be lucky with which drive you chose.
 
My case is closed yes. Ok i have my case open now. Doing a search on my SATA, no noise, doing a search on my IDE, no noise. Busy doing a defrag on the SATA and still no noise except for my CPU fan increasing speed:p

Maybe your drive is damaged? Mine is about 5months old now.
 
Definitely not a damaged drive! I have noticed this on more than seagate sata drive as I have a buddy who sells computer components and he's noticed the same thing. Might be a different version or revision of the same drive.

If you take a look at the second post by rob, he says that his drive (ST3200827AS) is also very loud. I assure you it's the drive version and not a damaged drive. I have the same drive and it's fairly loud while searching and doing defrags.

Out of interest sake, what is the version of your drive? Also what size is your drive?

Read this page linked above about AAM and seagate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Acoustic_Management

I think it's probably a different version of the drive or possibly even a different firmware version with AAM enabled.
 
frenchi6625 said:
thanks for the advice

looks like a completely silent rig will cost an arm and two legs.
Click to expand...

Mac Pro is virtually silent. Compared to my Pentium 4 tower my 3 GHz Mac Xeon (6 fans) is silent. You can hardly hear the fans so that you're
not sure if the thing is ON or OFF even and you can't hear the harddrives, either. I have a 250GB stock Apple WD one and a Seagate 320GB SATAII in it.

My Pentium 4 3.2 GHz has 6 fans (PSU, mobo, ATI-Radeon,
Matrox Extreme, Chassis and CPU). The mobo is the loudest however and
the PC sounds like a jet engine. I have 5 HDs installed on the thing and
you can't hear them above the noise at all. This brings me to the other thing,
do you really need a quiet drive if you're going to have fans generating the
noise anyhow.
 
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