KVR Audio

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 7:58 am

Looking on the Scan site, they do four hard drives at the size and price I'm looking for:

2TB Seagate ST2000DM006 BarraCuda, 3.5" HDD, SATA III - 6Gb/s, 7200rpm, 64MB Cache, 9.5ms, NCQ, OEM LN74291 £56.83
2TB Toshiba DT01ACA200, 3.5" HDD, SATA III - 6Gb/s, 7200rpm, 64MB Cache 8ms NCQ OEM LN49170 £54.98
2TB Toshiba P300, 7200RPM, 3.5”, SATA III - 6.0 Gb/s, 64MB Cache, 4.17ms, OEM LN75354 £59.48
2TB Western Digital WD20EZRZ WD Blue, 3.5" HDD, SATA III - 6Gb/s, 5400 RPM, 64MB Cache, OEM LN67746 £59.75

My "default" choice would be the Seagate - all my drives have been Seagate for a long time. However, the reason I'm buying is that my current drive has some errors on and, as it's my "archive" drive, I'd like to get everything off it to somewhere safe, in case it progressively dies. The current drive is a ST2000DM001 (I noticed that 4Tb drives haven't come down in price much recently, so I'm sticking with a "cheap" drive till they do.)

So I'm looking for a replacement, very quiet, drive. How do the four compare on noise? Given I dump ISO images onto this drive, I'm also somewhat concerned by throughput, so comments there would be appreciated, too.

lfm · Post by **lfm** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 11:52 am

I have three Barracuda 3.5" - 250 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB in same computer - and don't sense much noise are transferred to chassis.
I hear powersupply and sometimes graphics card fans - nothing I think is drives.

If having USB3 you might consider external drives as well - for some reason much more GB/back. 4 TB drives for $120 or so. Even a USB3 controller card are $30 or so - and should be on PCI Express rather close to full SATA3 with 6 Gbps.

khanyz · Post by **khanyz** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 12:04 pm

Check out the Seagate FireCuda Hybrid. It has a low noise/power HDD with a small SSD to improve performance. I use a 2.5” one in a laptop and it’s good. They also do 3.5” ones and have a 5 year warranty. Price is also good.

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 5:19 pm

I'm not convinced on hybrids, in general. Here, particularly, read speed isn't too much of an issue (it's mainly written to when I archive stuff off) and I'm more interested in total reliability on write than what in my view is just a big buffer and more to go wrong.

Also, I'm not looking for anything other than an internal drive. I've a SATA external slot for back ups and a pair of drives I swap in and out. However, this is for data I want "to hand" if I do need to retrieve it, though.

I read the WD Blue is very quiet - anyone comparative experience with that or the Tosh drives?

Zombie Queen · Post by **Zombie Queen** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 6:18 pm

I have WD Red, it is quieter than older Seagate I had before, also it is faster, even though it's 5400 RPM.

jdnz · Post by **jdnz** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 7:20 pm

pljones wrote:Also, I'm not looking for anything other than an internal drive. I've a SATA external slot for back ups and a pair of drives I swap in and out. However, this is for data I want "to hand" if I do need to retrieve it, though.

generally mtbf goes up as you move from the ‘consumer’ drives (green/blue/black) to the ‘nas’ drives (red/red pro) - so for reliability for archivng I’d probably spec a red or red pro

also, if this is an ‘archive’ then you need to think more about how it works in terms of handling failure, cos with modern drives (and their mad densities) failure is pretty much inevitable.

At the least I’d put a pair of internals in your machine and mirror them (either softRAID, proper h/w raid controller or just programmed backup/sync between them - the later is probably fine if you’re not writing a lot of data per day).

Secondly you need to think about worst case scenarios - what’s your recovery plan if your machine is destroyed (fires happen!) - I’d be thinking about syncing to a suitable off-site storage provider (amazon glacier would probably be the best fit in terms of costs - since it’s relatively cheap for just writing and you hope to NEVER have to read back from it and if you do you won’t mind the cost).

thecontrolcentre · Post by **thecontrolcentre** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 7:44 pm

I'm using 3 x 1TB SSDs (from SCAN).
1 x MZ-M5E 1T0BW 850 EVO mSATA and 2 x 1TB 850 EVO MZ-75E 1T0B/EU ... they're not cheap but are almost silent. I also use a TOURO Mobile MX3 1TB/T0 USB3 for my music and movie collection. Its very quiet.

jdnz · Post by **jdnz** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 7:54 pm

thecontrolcentre wrote:I'm using 3 x 1TB SSDs (from SCAN).
1 x MZ-M5E 1T0BW 850 EVO mSATA and 2 x 1TB 850 EVO MZ-75E 1T0B/EU ... they're not cheap but are almost silent.

if you’re hearing ANY noise off a pair off SSDs there’s something very odd going on

thecontrolcentre · Post by **thecontrolcentre** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 7:59 pm

jdnz wrote:
thecontrolcentre wrote:I'm using 3 x 1TB SSDs (from SCAN).
1 x MZ-M5E 1T0BW 850 EVO mSATA and 2 x 1TB 850 EVO MZ-75E 1T0B/EU ... they're not cheap but are almost silent.
if you’re hearing ANY noise off a pair off SSDs there’s something very odd going on

You're right, of course. I should have said that when I power up my pc there's no noise (until the fan kicks in very occasionally).

My external Touro drive makes more noise.

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 10:32 pm

jdnz wrote:generally mtbf goes up as you move from the ‘consumer’ drives (green/blue/black) to the ‘nas’ drives (red/red pro) - so for reliability for archivng I’d probably spec a red or red pro

also, if this is an ‘archive’ then you need to think more about how it works in terms of handling failure, cos with modern drives (and their mad densities) failure is pretty much inevitable.

At the least I’d put a pair of internals in your machine and mirror them (either softRAID, proper h/w raid controller or just programmed backup/sync between them - the later is probably fine if you’re not writing a lot of data per day).

Secondly you need to think about worst case scenarios - what’s your recovery plan if your machine is destroyed (fires happen!) - I’d be thinking about syncing to a suitable off-site storage provider (amazon glacier would probably be the best fit in terms of costs - since it’s relatively cheap for just writing and you hope to NEVER have to read back from it and if you do you won’t mind the cost).

Good advice -- but for me, I do backups every ... er.. well, when I remember... and then get around to it... swapping between a pair of drives. One sits a whole 1.5 metres away from my PC, the other in the slot. That's my "if I ever lose my PC, I really would be annoyed to lose this" stuff.

The archive is "I really don't want this clutter around my work folders but it'll be handy to have available". Old versions of software, old projects (these eat most of it - lots of WAVs), backups of purchased downloads that I've also cut to DVD-RW, etc. Mostly I wouldn't miss it (either it's not really that important or it's reasonably replaceable) but does come in handy quite often (saves finding the download, DVD, etc). Ideally, it'd be a bottomless pit with a good index

.

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 10:38 pm

thecontrolcentre wrote:I'm using 3 x 1TB SSDs (from SCAN).
1 x MZ-M5E 1T0BW 850 EVO mSATA and 2 x 1TB 850 EVO MZ-75E 1T0B/EU ... they're not cheap but are almost silent. I also use a TOURO Mobile MX3 1TB/T0 USB3 for my music and movie collection. Its very quiet.

Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have put "silent" in. "Quiet" is good enough

. I run a pair of SSDs for my boot/C drive and for samples. Everything else is on Barracudas, which I find quiet enough (I can be doing a disk scan and it's the CPU fan that'll be what I notice, I'll have to check the activity light to see if the drives are going, it's a good case).

(My media collection is off on a NUC on some 2.5" internal drive - that's pretty quiet, too.)

The ST2000DM006 would be a pretty straight replacement for the ST2000DM001 I have now (original post edited to mention that). Like I say, I'm happy enough with it, just after comparisons around that price and performance.

mcbpete · Post by **mcbpete** » Sat Oct 14, 2017 11:15 pm

I don't think I've heard my hard drive ticking away since when I had a laptop heads crash in mid '00s. Between how quiet drives are nowadays, how tucked away they are in the chassis, and how loud everything else is (mainly the fan) I honestly don't think drive noise is that much of an issue in this day and age

metamorphosis · Post by **metamorphosis** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 2:18 am

Any hard drive plus this:
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.c ... cleID=1588

Then you don't worry about hard drive noise.
I use three.

pljones · Post by **pljones** » Wed Oct 25, 2017 5:48 pm

Well, I left actually buying the drive a bit late... Machine wouldn't boot today until the drive it was to replace was disconnected. It's not even recognised as formattable media when I insert it into my SATA hotswap bay.

Windows, of course, just sits there dumbly saying nothing. Can't be bothered to tell me "Oh, one of your drives is causing issues, so I'll skip it and carry on booting." No, it just black screens...

I'll give it a go on my Linux server and see if that can get anywhere with some disk recovery tools.

Yeah, and get on and buy the damn drive...

"Silent" (Quiet) 2Tb Hard Drive choice