The quietest HDD?

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Sideface

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#171862 3-May-2015 21:00

I am building a small form factor desktop PC for general use (not gaming).
I want it to be as quiet as possible.
It will have an SSD plus one 3.5" HDD for data (speed is not important, silence is)
The graphics card is fanless and there is one slow, quiet, 20cm case fan.

Which HDD is quietest? I can't afford a 1TB SSD

(I have spare WD green drives but don't like the way they close down every few minutes)

Your thoughts?

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richms

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#1296279 3-May-2015 21:01

Ive found that in my current case which has little rubber things for the HDD that seek noise is prettymuch gone on a WD red and a WD blue in it.

Spinup noise is still there but thats a once only thing.

Richard rich.ms

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#1296280 3-May-2015 21:03

WD green haha

khull

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#1296281 3-May-2015 21:08

would you consider a 1/2TB 2.5" ? they are probably the best for what you need to do

coffeebaron

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#1296283 3-May-2015 21:11

Yea, 2.5inch 5400 RPM.

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Athlonite

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#1296286 3-May-2015 21:16

or you could use a Western Digital RE HDD like this one WDC WD2003FYYS it's an RE4 7200rpm 64MB cache and quiter than a mouse farting

timmmay

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#1296287 3-May-2015 21:17

The quietest HDD is the one in another room, eg NAS. But you may want a 5400 RPM drive, not 7200.

Athlonite

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#1296301 3-May-2015 21:42

timmmay: The quietest HDD is the one in another room, eg NAS. But you may want a 5400 RPM drive, not 7200.

I sit right next to my case and use only 7200rpm HDD's I can't hear any of them how they are mounted make a big difference all my HDD's have silicone supports so no vibrations going into the case when it's working hard

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Sideface

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#1297577 4-May-2015 12:33

Thank you all for your suggestions

It would be difficult to install a second 2.5" drive in this enclosure, and as I need more than 2TB of storage, I'll stick to a 3.5" HDD on neoprene mounts.
The WD RE4s sound great, but are too expensive.

I've decided to use a 4TB WD Red as my secondary drive.

WD Red drives use "Intellipower" technology, which provides RPMs between 5,400-7,200rpm, and Reds don't the have the aggressive head parking ("IntelliPark") of WD Greens.

I'm using Reds in my 3 NAS units, all of which run quietly.

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gbwelly

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#1297618 4-May-2015 13:07

Sideface: I am building a small form factor desktop PC for general use (not gaming).
I want it to be as quiet as possible.
It will have an SSD plus one 3.5" HDD for data (speed is not important, silence is)
The graphics card is fanless and there is one slow, quiet, 20cm case fan.

Which HDD is quietest? I can't afford a 1TB SSD

(I have spare WD green drives but don't like the way they close down every few minutes)

Your thoughts?

I neutered the spindown on my green drives using WDIDLE.exe. They are still pants but now less so.

Sideface

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#1300419 8-May-2015 09:08

gbwelly:
Sideface: (I have spare WD green drives but don't like the way they close down every few minutes)

I neutered the spindown on my green drives using WDIDLE.exe. They are still pants but now less so.

+1

Thanks for this advice - saved me some money

I have several spare WD Greens, and suddenly they have become useful again.

I downloaded the WDIDLE3 tool in FreeDOS image format and burnt a boot CD.

No data was lost despite tweaking the Greens.

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tommywd

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#1302661 12-May-2015 11:48

Hi @Sideface, for a truly quiet computer, many 3.5" drives vibrate a bit too much to simply bolt into the case normally. A lot of the noise depends on how the hard drive is mounted in a PC. Vibration dampeners work wonders compares to a drive mounted directly to a metal frame with screws. They tend to vibrate the whole case which can get transferred to whatever the PC is sitting on wether it be on the floor/desk/entertainment center.

What you could do is have a SSD boot drive so you don't have to access your hard drive as often so you won't hear it. That being said, you might want to check out WD Black² Dual Drives (120GB SSD + 1TB HDD). The WD Black 2 Dual Drive is an affordable dual-drive solution with ample space for both laptops and desktops, and is an excellent choice as a replacement drive.

Source: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=jOW8Pc

I hope you find the above information useful.

Cheers!

Sideface

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#1302728 12-May-2015 13:24

tommywd: Hi @Sideface, for a truly quiet computer, many 3.5" drives vibrate a bit too much to simply bolt into the case normally. A lot of the noise depends on how the hard drive is mounted in a PC. Vibration dampeners work wonders compares to a drive mounted directly to a metal frame with screws. They tend to vibrate the whole case which can get transferred to whatever the PC is sitting on wether it be on the floor/desk/entertainment center.

What you could do is have a SSD boot drive so you don't have to access your hard drive as often so you won't hear it. That being said, you might want to check out WD Black² Dual Drives (120GB SSD + 1TB HDD). The WD Black 2 Dual Drive is an affordable dual-drive solution with ample space for both laptops and desktops, and is an excellent choice as a replacement drive.

Source: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=jOW8Pc

I hope you find the above information useful.

Cheers!

Thanks.
I am using an SSD boot drive and one 3.5" WD green HDD mounted on neoprene dampers (HDD modified to defeat "IntelliPark").
The graphics card is fanless, and there is only one large, slow, and very quiet case fan.
Result: near silence.

PS I'm already using a 120GB/1TB WD Black dual drive in an Intel NUC - it works well and is very quiet (but $$$).

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timmmay

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#1302749 12-May-2015 13:32

The problem with spinning disks (of which I have I think three in my PC) is the spin up time. Even the good quality HGST 7200rpm drives take a while to spin up - plus in storage spaces RAID I'm starting to wonder if they spin up in series not parallel. I find this happens all kinds of random times - starting FileZilla (which is on the SSD), starting other random programs (which are on the SSD), etc.

richms

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#1302803 12-May-2015 14:06

Thats why I have kicked all spinning media storage out of the desktop PCs onto other machines and shared.

Even a shared drive in windows performance is good enough to not really bother me. Im not going to the stage of editing 4k video off them or anything, but as far as storing media, photos, not in play parts of the steam library etc they work just fine.

Richard rich.ms