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Any specific suggestions for quiet internal hard drives?

D

Detosx

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 27, 2010
117
0
I am curious - for curious see lazy, as I don't want to spend the whole night in search mode - to know what people with noisy hard drives have replaced their drives with?

I was considering Samsung but I rarely see them mentioned. As a system builder I used to favor IBM/Hitachi and Samsung drives for reliability and quietness respectively but with iMacs and Apple specific firmware I am in a new world. Should I be going for hardware that Apple are using themselves and where can I find firmware to flash them with, if needed. For instance the Seagate drive that people are having problems with is flashed with Apple specific firmware, 'AP25' unless the discussion I read between a Seagate tech and an Apple user was fiction, and Seagate's replacement firmware for said hard drives is, apparently, not for Macs.
 
atlanticza said:
Why not read the HDD reviews on Tom's Hardware site?
Click to expand...
Hi atlanticza, Tom's is great but my question is are there firmware considerations to getting, say, a Samsung 2TB drive working in the iMac. For instance, the firmware on the Seagate used in my iMac, according to a Seagate tech in a quoted forum post back in September, is Apple specific; Seagate are apparently aware of the noise problem with that model but their firmware update is, apparently, not for Apple users. It would be good to know why. If the Seagate firmware set the Disk Label to the standard msdos rather than gpt, it might make some kind of sense but I can't imagine because it would cause data loss for anyone who had set the Disk label for other computer formats. Even then I could change it back to gpt in Gparted and it would be recognized as GUID.

- why not just return the iMac to Apple? There is no Apple dealer where I live, I use public transport and better answer is that I want to upgrade the HD anyway.

Assuming the Seagate poster wasn't making the Seagate technician conversation up, do I need to stick both to hard drive models that Apple are using in the 2010 model, which would make sense if Apple like HP have some kind of white-list, and also flash said hard drive with Apple firmware? Already I have read sprawling threads about people saying that if you want to go up to 16GB (on the 2010 model) you need to use Samsung or Hynix memory as others are reporting problems. People using certain brands of SSD are apparently having hibernation problems, and so on. I want to get this right and this community is a good place to start. :)
 
Last edited:
Seagate is crap, avoid them. Depends what capacity you are looking for. Hitachi has decent and quiet 2TB 7200rpm drives, in fact those are what Apple uses in iMacs. If you are looking at under 1TB, WD Caviar Blues are decent. Samsung F3s are great as well from what I've read.

Any 3.5" drive should work though.
 
Hellhammer said:
Seagate is crap, avoid them. Depends what capacity you are looking for. Hitachi has decent and quiet 2TB 7200rpm drives, in fact those are what Apple uses in iMacs. If you are looking at under 1TB, WD Caviar Blues are decent. Samsung F3s are great as well from what I've read.

Any 3.5" drive should work though.
Click to expand...
Thank you Hellhammer, I appreciate the input. I have a mental shortlist of drives but am concerned about possible firmware issues, both on the hard drive and in connection with the firmware on the motherboard. The iMac seems fairly tightly locked down, in terms of what memory brand you can use (reliably at 16GB in the 2010 model) and what SSD you can use, in terms of proper hibernation (someone told me Intel) and again should I be flashing said SSD with apple-specific firmware?
 
Detosx said:
Thank you Hellhammer, I appreciate the input. I have a mental shortlist of drives but am concerned about possible firmware issues, both on the hard drive and in connection with the firmware on the motherboard. The iMac seems fairly tightly locked down, in terms of what memory brand you can use (reliably at 16GB in the 2010 model) and what SSD you can use, in terms of proper hibernation (someone told me Intel) and again should I be flashing said SSD with apple-specific firmware?
Click to expand...

SandForce based SSDs currently suffer from some issues under OS X like the hibernation but sooner than later there will be an updated firmware that will fix it. There is no Mac-sepcific firmware though because you can't even update the firmware of SF SSDs in OS X (yet).

However, hard drives don't have similar restrictions. There is no need to play or even think about firmwares, just get a new drive and install it.
 
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