Seagate Barracuda 320gig SATA-II Hard Drives. (TOO Noisy)

[acrobat]

Hi all, I have had my new PC up and running for a week or so now. I absolutely love it, but I have a couple of issues.

One, I want to get off my chest in this thread. I have scoured the internet for a solution and it seems there is none (or few). There is a lot of discussion about it though.

Anyway, these disks are noisy! I have used PC's for around 20 years now, and I have had many hard disks. In the old days they where all pretty loud. The last noisy disk I owned was a 10gig IBM which was fairly noisy.

After that one though, I upgraded to an 80gig 7200rpm 2mb cache IDE (not SATA) disk. It ran too hot for my liking, but it has lasted around 7 years and is still going strong, and it is very quiet. There are two types of noise a disk can make. One is the whirling noise of its motor, and the other one is the grinding noise when it seeks/writes etc. The Maxtor I mentioned was silent in the first type of noise, and just very quiet in the second type. You could hear it when it was reading and writing, but you had to listen fairly closely.

This new one though (Seagate Barracuda 320gig SATA-II) is MUCH noisier than my old Maxtor 80gig.

It is very fast, and runs cooler than that old disk. There is no whirling noise like the old disk, but the seeks are probably 5 times louder. It is as loud as the old disks I used to have years ago. Aswell as the grinding noise, these disks seem to make a strange cracking/tweeting type noise from time to time too.

Its not hugely annoying, but the rest of my PC is almost silent, so these disks stand out like a sore thumb. I thought I would mention it because I would have to suggest not buying one of these drives if you are looking to upgrade. The Western Digital equivalent is almost the same speed. A few miliseconds slower at some things, and faster at some things.

It only has a 1 year warrenty though, where as these Seagates have a 5! year warrenty. But what good is a warrenty anyway? Reliability is the most important thing because a warrenty won't replace your lost important data. Both brands are reliable though, and people who own both brands have had failures from time to time. So they are pretty equal all around. But then the Seagate loses out in the end due to the noise. So if you want a new disk, I would suggest not buying one of these seagate barracudas (new 7200.10 model).

p.s. I am not sure I would be able to return them seeing as they aren't broken and I already installed all my stuff on them. So I'm going to try to find a hard drive cooler that has good accoustic dampening. Either that or I'm going to do a home made fix I read about on the internet where you suspend them inside the case in a rubber tube. Or you cut bits of a rubber and jam it down the side of the disk between the disk and the rack.

p.s. If anyone knows a good hard drive cooler that is the best at keeping it quiet, please let me know! I dont really need the cooling ability.. I just want to make it quieter. I looked on scan.co.uk and they have about a dozen but I have no idea which is good and which is average etc. I tried to look them up on google but couldn't find much in the way of reviews.

[this_is_gav]

My 320GB 7200.10 is just about silent, except when NCQ kicks in, in which case it can make a very slight squeeking noise... :\

Anyway, touch wood, it's still going strong.

A discussion I read around 2 weeks ago said there are in fact 2 different motors than go into these drives, and while one is as silent as the old 7200.9s were famous for, the other is, while not exceptionally (Raptor like) loud, it is noticeable. My 400GB 7200.10 is the latter.

I wouldn't call them all that loud, but you wouldn't want the noisier variant in an HTPC.

[this_is_gav]

You have to laugh... not 2 hours after that post, I get some random restarts, and upon the most recent 2 boots (between random stability tests to try and work out what's causing it), I get a SMART alert on the 1 Seagate drive I currently have installed (the 320GB one above).

At this moment, I'm moving 200GB of school panto editing data from my Western Digital media drive onto my media PC, then I'll (hopefully) move the data over from my failing Seagate drive onto that WD one.

I've got another Seagate 400GB drive that I'm not convinced about either, but I'll backup the data onto that too I guess, just incase.

Touching the wood didn't help much

A few touches of BIOS and Windows loading graphics corruption, and a lockup under ATI Tray Tools almost had me buying an 8800GTX...

[amjedm]

I did a fair bit of reading on silentpcreview before buying a SATA hard disk and as you've already stated the newer Seagates are noisy.

Having said that though, I bought a Samsung 80GB SATA from Scan and it was noisy so I sold it. I bought the same again from Scan and this is quiet. Reason for buying the same one again was that I found out you could change NCQ (or some other setting). This isn't possible on the Seagates unfortunately.

Are you referring to the WD drives having one year warranty? AFAIK they have 3 years warranty.

Suspending hard drives will only cut out the vibration, not seek noise, you can give it a go though.

Best place to check out home made noise reduction techniques are the forums on silentpcreview - http://forums.silentpcreview.com.

If you want to opt for an enclosure then check out the following user review

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums...ic.php?t=32509

[acrobat]

Thanks all! I read quite a lot about this too. Some people are saying their drive is quiet and im not sure why that is.

I read about the motor issue too. One is from china and one is made somewhere else.. and one is quiet the other one is not. But as far as I can tell, its not the motor making mine loud. Its actually 100% silent when not doing anything (like now, as I type). There is no whine or whirling motor noise or anything. But when I load windows, load a game, savegame when playing, do a virus check, install something, etc..etc..etc.., it then, when its actually reading and writing, that it gets really noisy.

It maybe seems worse than usual because my last drive was very quiet (almost silent) all the time. But I do still think its definitely noisy compared to other drives. Compared the my 8800GTX fan, two golf ball fans, and a CPU heatsink/fan, its about 10 times louder than all of them put together :O

No idea why My case is an Akasa Eclipse-62 by the way which seems ok for noise. And the drive isn't vibrating and getting rest of the case to shake or anything. Its just when it reads and writes, it sounds like someone is grinding pedals through a windmill.

Are you referring to the WD drives having one year warranty? AFAIK they have 3 years warranty.

Yeah I thought they have 3 actually. When i was researching which drives to buy, i read a really thorough review which said the WD had 3 years and the Seagate had 5. I went with the Seagate but it was a really close call.

When reading about this noise issue the other day though, someone said WD's have a 1yr warrenty. But they may have been wrong.

Suspending hard drives will only cut out the vibration, not seek noise, you can give it a go though.

Best place to check out home made noise reduction techniques are the forums on silentpcreview - http://forums.silentpcreview.com.

If you want to opt for an enclosure then check out the following user review

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums...ic.php?t=32509

Thanks bud! Thats REALLY useful. I will have a good read of that stuff. And yeah, I definitely think I will suspend the drive, or get a cooler bay thingy. The drives are actually very fast and people say they are reliable... and Im not sure I could return them to scan now anyway after using them and seeing as they work... so I will probably try to just make the best of it and shut them up with a rubber thingy or drive bay or whatever.

Thanks all.

[Koolpc]

Samsung drives are very quiet indeed.

[amjedm]

Thanks bud! Thats REALLY useful. I will have a good read of that stuff. And yeah, I definitely think I will suspend the drive, or get a cooler bay thingy. The drives are actually very fast and people say they are reliable... and Im not sure I could return them to scan now anyway after using them and seeing as they work... so I will probably try to just make the best of it and shut them up with a rubber thingy or drive bay or whatever.

Thanks all.

I've got the Akasa case as well , link to how I've suspended a Barracuda

http://forums.hexus.net/showpost.php...2&postcount=11

I think Seagate are very good in terms of reliability so you made the right choice - only the noise issue.

If you're desperate to sell them then you may not loose too much on ebay.

[this_is_gav]

I think Seagate are very good in terms of reliability so you made the right choice - only the noise issue.

Prior to the 7200.10s I'd have agreed... that's 2 of them I've bought, and 2 of them that's failed... this is after what 6 years of going through Western Digitals (2x40GB IDE, 4x36GB Raptors, 1x160GB, 1x250GB and 1x320GB SATAs), and I'm still waiting on my first issue.

It's fair to say that the 7200.10s certainly do not carry on what Seagate are renowned for (solid, quiet hard drives).

[amjedm]

Prior to the 7200.10s I'd have agreed... that's 2 of them I've bought, and 2 of them that's failed... this is after what 6 years of going through Western Digitals (2x40GB IDE, 4x36GB Raptors, 1x160GB, 1x250GB and 1x320GB SATAs), and I'm still waiting on my first issue.

It's fair to say that the 7200.10s certainly do not carry on what Seagate are renowned for (solid, quiet hard drives).

and [shock], better change my opinion on Segates then.

Thanks for the info.

[IAmATeaf]

I had a Seagate 7200.7 160Gb NCQ drive that was very noisy and made what I can only describe as a loud chirping sound randomly. I purchased 2 drives the same and originally thought there was a fault with the mobo which was causing the case speaker to emit the sound but after some more investigation found it was 1 of the drives.

I contacted the retailer and Seagate and told them both that I had 2 identical drives, 1 made the sound the other didn't but they reckoned there was nothing wrong. Anyway to cut a long story short the drive that chirped died after around 7 months so had it RMA'ed and the replacement is fine.