Looking for a quiet 4TB drive

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llmercll

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 17, 2010
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Hi everyone!

I recently purchased some HGST Desktar NAS drives because of their reputed reliability. I was disappointed, however, when I turned them on and noticed how loud they were! They are easily the loudest component of my system and I can not tolerate it.

I'm thinking of trying the HGST Desktar Coolspin series instead. Is that my best bet for quiet storage drives or are the WD reds or greens worth looking into as well? Speed is not a concern, just noise and reliability.

Thank you!
 
WD reds do not make much noise at all. There are no reasons to buy the Green drives anymore IMHO
 
Good thing you didn't get the WD Black, those would probably drive you insane.
I put in a 4TB Black to replace a 2 TB Green since I wanted a little more space and some more speed.
Drive is only loud when it is reading and writing.
The Green was pretty quiet, haven't used a Red so I can't comment on those.
 
A strange thing.

I bought the exact HGST NAS drive you have and when I was populating it with data, it was laying on a surface and was very noisy as it vibrated on the surface. I was quite annoyed.
However, it is now inside my case and isnt even screwed in, yet it is completely silent.
(in a bay that has no other means of securing the drive than screws, nothing locks it solidly in place)
And I mean completely silent, not even a slight noise. My PC is in the living room with undervolted fans, watercooled and permanently on so has to be very quiet.

Try as I did, leave drives loose mounted.
If you cant get them quieter, try mounting on paper or elastic bands.
ie place paper/rubber in the mount and slide the drive in afterwards.
 
Thanks for the replies. The HGST NAS drives do vibrate quite a bit, but even by suspending them in my case they were still much louder than I'd prefer (just not unbearable as before!). silentpc observes this in older model hitachis as well.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article29-page2.html

I currently have some of the 5400rpm (or 5900?) HGST coolspins on the way to test them out.

The Reds are very quiet, but how are they for reliability?
 
I'm sure they're fine for reliability. Note that when a Green is running it still isn't silent. I don't know how quiet your PC is now but if you're reading SPCR chances are you're obsessed, like me.

As it is my 6TB Green is the loudest part of my machine when I'm not gaming and the GFX fans are off. The acoustics are pretty good so it's not too bad, and I definitely can't afford 6TB of SSDs but maybe your situation is different.

SPCR has all but stopped reviewing stuff but last I remember the reds were ~1db higher than the Greens. Not giving an opinion just letting you know.
 
My 5TB Toshiba is unbearably loud. Scratch that off the list.
 
zaniix said:
WD reds do not make much noise at all. There are no reasons to buy the Green drives anymore IMHO
Click to expand...

Plenty of reasons to buy greens. Keep in mind reds are intended to be part of a RAID. They give up on bad sectors rather quickly and thus aren't suited for single drive scenarios.
 
FnordMan said:
Plenty of reasons to buy greens. Keep in mind reds are intended to be part of a RAID. They give up on bad sectors rather quickly and thus aren't suited for single drive scenarios.
Click to expand...

Sorry but I see this as a good thing not a bad one. When a drive fails and you want to try and recover data it goes smoother if the drive doesn't get stuck wasting its time on a sector you will never get anything from.

Reds might be intended for RAID, but they work very well as desktop drives. I have never had any issues
 
In my main rig I have a 1TB SSD and 6TB Red. I recently noticed that the Red would go to sleep (something I explicitly disabled, so I don't know why) because resuming the playing of a video after some time would take some seconds : I didn't hear it spin down or up at all. Reading or writing is not noisy either, as long as it's not concurrent writes making the heads go all over the place.

I'm watercooled (CPU and GPU) but not uber silent either, if nothing else was spinning I might hear it, I wouldn't call it loud anyway.

The HGST are fine, I got 20 in my ZFS array, but they're 7200rpm : loud and hot.
 
llmercll said:
The Reds are very quiet, but how are they for reliability?
Click to expand...
One thing you can count on hdds is that they will fail no matter the brand, lot, shipping, etc. Some will last more than others, but there is no way of have a true way to say which one will fail on you first. With hdds just backup, there is no easy way, buy the quietest drive your budget allows that furfills you storage needs, and then get an external hdd to backup or a cloud service.

I have ran three WD 3tb reds in two different setups for a couple of years now, and they are fine, no issues at all, and they are hard mounted and i cant hear them, they are not silent, but quiet enough for my ambient noise to disregard the hdd noise.

Good luck with the choice,
 
The obvious (?) solution is to move mass storage out of your PC and onto your network. Set up a NAS or small file server in a location where you won't hear it.
 
JJ Johnson said:
The obvious (?) solution is to move mass storage out of your PC and onto your network. Set up a NAS or small file server in a location where you won't hear it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's what I do. Desktop is 100% SSD, the NAS/server box runs in another room where it doesn't matter where it's a bit on the noisy side.
 
I received the coolspins the other day. These are much quieter than the NAS version, running at only 5700rpm, but are rather slow. The transfer rate is around 100MBps which is acceptable, but the seek times are worse than my old Samsung HD204UI, and is noticeable when navigating folders. It's not a deal-breaker for me, however, because it's a very large drive with great reliability, and it's just a storage drive.

The problem is that it is still the loudest component in my desktop, and I can hear it at idle quite noticeably. It isn't caused by vibration (unlike the 7200 NAS that vibrated excessively), but rather just the spinning of the drive. I never imagined the hard drive would be the loudest component in my system, but I've managed to avoid loud components in general and over time my computer has become more and more quiet.

I really do want to have a NAS box outside my bedroom, and I've considered it in the past, but I don't have an easy way to setting that up in my small apartment. I wouldn't want a wireless NAS (unless these actually work well, I'm quite ignorant on the subject) and would need to put it downstairs, so running a wire wouldn't work. I'll be mulling over my options today, hopefully coming up with a creative solution. Any ideas here would be really appreciated as well.

Thanks everyone!
 
Put the NAS under your sink, bed etc etc.
Or a wooden box with an air intake low down and a hole in the top to allow air flow.

Anywhere that has a non restricted supply of air or where the air can cool.
 
llmercll said:
The problem is that it is still the loudest component in my desktop, and I can hear it at idle quite noticeably. It isn't caused by vibration (unlike the 7200 NAS that vibrated excessively), but rather just the spinning of the drive.
Click to expand...
Besides moving the HDs elsewhere, you can also use enclosures such as the Smart Drive or Scythe Quietdrive. Doing this for a bunch of drives becomes expensive, but it's feasible for a few. A good enclosure is one of the few components that's actually a long-term investment; it won't break or wear out, so it's useful until you stop using that size HD. I bought my 1st Smart Drive (used) in early 2006, and it continues to work well. My RaidZ1 looks like this:
Smart%20Drives_zpsklcsgrfz.png


llmercll said:
I never imagined the hard drive would be the loudest component in my system, but I've managed to avoid loud components in general and over time my computer has become more and more quiet.
Click to expand...
Stay on the silencing path, and you'll eventually complain about your monitor's noise...
 
Turn the telly on, you wont care about minor noises.
 
mls1995 said:
Reds are quiet. Even the Red Pro is quiet (I have 3)
Click to expand...

WDC RED drives are slower than HGST coolspins however. Well at least with my testing.

I received the coolspins the other day. These are much quieter than the NAS version, running at only 5700rpm. The transfer rate is around 100MBps which is acceptable
Click to expand...

I get around 150MB /s read or write in the outer tracks on these using dd on linux. And like most other drives about 1/2 that on the inner most tracks.
 
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Whats the reliability of the 3,4 and 6tb Reds, I remember when 3tb drives first hit the market they were failing left and right regardless of brand? How many platters are in each drive?
 
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