SATA Hard Drives

[chaos945]

I'm in the market for a new SATA hard drive

Here is the listing of the drives available to me by my local retailer. I was wondering if any of you have had experience with any of these or have suggestions on other drives that you would recommend. Any resources, tips or experiences you've had are welcome.

The two things that are most important to me in order of importance are:
* noise output, must be very low
* performance

I've listed the top 4 manufacturors in the poll. I hear very good things about Samsung but unfortunately my retailer does not carry any SATA drives from them, I refuse to order it unless the price is very good. The WD Raptor's are very tempting with their performance but I fear the noise would be too much.

Related Threads: Posted, then went and looked in the forum..atleast the poll is new.
"Recommend me a SATA"
"Recommended Hard Drives"

 

[leencaci]

I have 2 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax 9 SATA drives on a RAID0. I am very happy with performance and noise level. So far so good. My 2 cents.

 

[Mainframeguy]

And I have a single Seagate 200 Gb Sata for my boot drive - pretty happy with noise levels, almost as low as the ATA Barracuda and Spinpoints I have in there (which were selected with silence in mind).

Raptors will be horribly noisy - but be aware you can try to mitigate noise by suspending HD's and making vented enclosures for them if you are prepared to do the work.....

 

[Zedric]

Seagates are very quite drives. I've heard that the new Samsungs are as well, but I've never used one so I can't say.

 

[onimkron]

Seagate are very quiet from my experience with them, but I've only had them compared to Maxtor and Samsung- the latter in particular is really quiet, you barely know it's there at times

Edit: For Sata, I'd recommend Seagate, it's a good tradeoff between speed and quietness.

 

[Electronic Punk]

Maxtor (Diamond 9 or 10)

 

[vern]

I've always had a good experience with Maxtor drives. All my drives are now Maxtor including 2 200GB drives. Those are IDE though since they are on a pretty dated Linux box. They are very quiet. Incidentally, the loudest drive I've ever had was a Seagate 540MB. Things have changed I guess.

 

[RazerBack]

No experience with any of those brands, I use 2 Hitachi HDs in Raid 0, fast and quiet

 

[dreamliner77]

My Maxtors are the loudest thing in my case...

 

[Zedric]

Incidentally, the loudest drive I've ever had was a Seagate 540MB. Things have changed I guess.

LOL, indeed they have. I don't think any drive older than, say, three years can be included into a fair comparison for noise (or speed for that matter) in this case.