Samsung EcoGreen or WD Green drives

[cotswoldcs]

I have my Velociraptor in a SilentDrive and am very pleased with how inaudable it is. Granted that without the SilentDrive the noise is about the same as a modern hard drive. Until something significantly faster and better comes along it will be on my shopping list but I don't think SSDs are good enough yet.

Back on topic, I'm interested in a 1Tb drive for backup and can't decide between the two. I read the Tom's Hardware review (that was linked earlier) with interest. Both Samsung and WD seem good choices and there is no clear winner. I think I'll go with WD because I have more faith in their reliability but would be interested to hear other readers' comments.

[TooNice]

Samsung drives are as quiet as they get for seek, but the worst of almost all manufacturers for vibration, so much so that one F1 Samsung is clearly audible over two HD4870X2 graphics cards under load in a case.

The 5400RPM F2 is not audible over the P182 case fans on low. And I can't imagine those being louder than one 4870, let alone two 4870x2. And to be perfectly honest, I had the F1's predecessor, and they were not that bad either even without suspension (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 were much worse).

[sammorris]

I have both a 7200.10 and two HD753LJs, the Seagate is worse, but only just. Using a P182 is not justification for a hard disk's vibration as that is one of very few cases on the market that actually cancels hard disk vibration really well. 90% of cases on the market will be more than twice as loud as the 182 for hard disk vibrations.

[TooNice]

The P182 was bought for a recent new build. My previous case was a Coolermaster CM201 Black Widow. Nice looking case, not bad to work with for it's age, but being full aluminium, it does not dampen noise/vibration particularly well. But I stand by that the two Samsung T166 I kept in it produced less noise than the Raptor were not audible over the system fans. The Raptor I later added was louder, but the Seagate was louder still.

[TooNice]

Righty, the article may is about a week old, so some of you may already have seen it. I am bumping/posting this in case any of you, like myself, do not check SPCR more than once a week: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article951-page4.html

In short, the F2 is quieter (barely) than the GP on idle, louder (barely) than the GP on seek, with less vibration than the GP. Pretty much confirms my suspicion that it is one of the most quiet drive you can get. Not very power hungry either (but what is, when you look at GFX cards).

The only thing to be seen is how reliable they are. There are definitely more people reporting issues about Samsung drives since the F1 (though it's hard to say if it's in part due to the increased of sales Samsung since the the F1), so here's hoping the F2 also improve on reliability.

[sammorris]

That's interesting because vibration is where Samsung always scored the lowest for years. The noisier seek is a little disappointing though. Looks like Samsung traded places with WD for the Green drives.

[iglepiggle]

What if the drives were suspended. Wouldn't the vibration not be felt then? Wouldn't this be the same for the velociraptor drives too?

[sammorris]

Well, if suspended properly, you shouldn't hear any drive's vibration at all. If doing this, the WD would win for lower seek noise. The Velociraptor's seek noise is much higher than any green drive, so suspending it, while reducing the noise somewhat, wouldn't give you a silent drive. With the 5400rpm drives, it pretty much would.

[iglepiggle]

Thing is, 5400 is slow, isn't it?

[sammorris]

Well yes, but thanks to improvements in drive technology they're no slower than the early 7200rpm drives and they're very quiet and use little power. That's their main purpose, but two of my three PCs (my file server and my work PC) both use WD Green drives for their OSes, as they're perfectly fast enough to do the job. I wouldn't want to use one with Vista, as you really need a Velociraptor, next gen SSD or SAS array to load vista quickly, but for XP and Win7 they're alright, not to mention cheap.