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Hard drive suggestions

L

Luis Ortega

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 10, 2007
1,194
374
I recently replaced the 320gb standard drive that came with my Mac Pro with a WD Caviar Black 750gb with 64mb buffer and 7200 rpm.
I decided to return it because it was much louder than the original drive.
It makes a sort of croaky noise whenever it it used and it keeps making brief little noises when it sits idle.
It doesn't sound like it's breaking, but the noise is irritating and very noticeable since the boot drive sits at the front of the MP, which is next to me.
The old drive was basically silent, but it was about 75% full and I wanted a drive with more room.
I don't know if these WD drives are normally that noisy, but it didn't inspire confidence.

Can anyone suggest a reliable, quiet 500-750gb 7200 rpm drive, maybe with a 64mb buffer?
Are the Samsung spin points any good? Is Seagate a better choice? Is there any significant benefit to a 64 mb buffer over a 32 mb buffer?
Could my WD drive have been faulty if it made such noises?

Thanks a lot for any advice.
 
According to Tom's Hardware, the Samsung and Seagate models were some of the quietest 3.5" drives they tested, with WD Black being one of the loudest.

sound_level_database.png


See here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-11.html
 
I've got a few WD Caviar Black drives and find them to be pretty quiet. I wonder if you got a bad one?
 
Running 2 WD Blacks...definitely putting them to good use. I can hear them, but they're not annoyingly loud.
 
As mentioned before here, noise perception is subjective.

I banned all WD Blacks from my Pro (the 640GB that got shipped with it and 2 1TB ones) and replaced them with larger WD Greens. IMO the Blacks are terribly loud. No comparison to the Greens, which are inaudible.

I've got the stock 640GB in an external enclosure and use it as the bootable clone of the boot drive. Incredible how loud that drive is compared to the Mac Pro.
 
I use a Caviar Blue and a Spinpoint F3. the Blue is pretty much the same as a Black performance-wise, except with more latency. it's also quieter and cooler.

the F3 is faster at all sequential read/write, but slower in 256k random write and random reads, according to Xbench.
 
Made the mistake of purchasing a non-brandname drive a few years ago... Never again.

Seagates have never failed to be my quietest drives; Western Digital, while a great contender, hasn't shown to be quite as noiseless.
 
Out of all my drives (a LOT in my collection because I'm an editor), my Samsungs (older F1s) are the quietest, although they do have this rather bizarre sounding spin-up when waking from standby. I'm pretty sure it's normal because all three of them do it. No reliability issues thus far and the drives are almost 3 years old. I can't speak for the newer F3 models.

My Caviar Blacks are the loudest, but they're not overly loud. I've owned 10-15k-rpm SCSI drives in the past that are several magnitudes louder.

I own one Caviar Blue (OEM Apple drive; not used for boot anymore) and a few 7,200-rpm Seagates of various ages. The noise levels on those sort fall in between the Samsungs and the Caviar Blacks.
 
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