I see we dont have a forum for HTPCs which i figured would be the best place to put a question like this but I guess SFFs is close enough. Anyway I'm after a silent drive to put in a HTPC. After doing a lot of reading the Spinpoints seem to be the drive to get, unless someone can recomend a different one. I started looking into the spinpoints at samsungs site and theres more models than you can shake a stick at... but I only found 2 sata drives. Can anyone recommend a model? I'm after a 7200RPM SATA about 200G area.
I've not had any personal experience with SpinPoints, but I hear many good things about them. Looking around, the SpinPoint P120 SP2004C seems appropriate for you. It's a 7200rpm 200GB SATA model, with NCQ and an 8mb cache
Ya I saw that one but I don't know if thats one that it considered quiet or not. They really dont mention it. At least not like they talk about the P80 series IIRC, when they say you wont even know its there. But its a PATA drive.
I saw a really cool article about an array of 4200 rpm laptop drives. They were faster and quieter than standalone desktop drives. They did a raid 0 of 2 drives and a raid 0 of 4 drives. Much quieter and much faster. Of course, much more expensive also. You would need: --a 4 channel ide raid card --4 ide to laptop ide adapters --4 (40gb at least) 4200 rpm laptop drives --case big enough to handle all this If money's no object, go for it.
That would be nice, but that's gonna be too pricey and big. And I probably won't have the pci slot to spare.
i dont know why anyone is worried about hd speed, honestly how much speed do you need to transfer a 768~kbps bitrate that most audio/video files run at..., i use a 20 gig ibm travelstar, 'silent' only 20 gig becuase i pull all my media off of my server and my desktop over 300gigs of media, its silly to actually keep all your media locally on your htpc anyway, since on a tv its hard to manage an archive that big anyway, there is my htpc http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=93070
The new spinpoint P120 is THE quietest 3.5" drive you'll find. It's got 250gig memory and performs very near to raptor speeds when loading games. It's also not too pricey!
I just picked up a Seagate 7200.8 250GB today. I know not what we were talking about. I lined this drive up for my gaming rig and I'm tired of my 40G maxtor jet engine. I've heard nothing but very good reviews about the seagates. IIRC most HDD manufacturers have little utilities to quieten down the seeks, at the price of performance I'm sure. If it does well I'll get another. If not I'll look at getting a spinpoint. Hmm... Maybe I shoulda done this the other way around and got the spinpoint first...
something tells me that a raid array of 4200rpm drives are going to have a much slower seek time then a desktop 7200rpm drive
or u could go the cheap way (like i did and works perfectly fine). You could take an old cdrom drive and take all the guts out except the tray. Then cut out the back so the cable can fit through. Then just place the hard drive and put the cover back on. Now the hard drive touches aluminum so it helps cool it off. I run my pc 24/7 and I have no problems. With this hack you can't hear the hard drive running.
i personally have a 120 gig spinpoint sp1213c i cant hear it over my old 20 gig maxtor 5400rpm drive.
I got the 7200.8 fired up last night and at idle I need to put my ear about 1" to 2" away before I can even tell that its running. The seeks are audible but barely. Overall I'm very impressed with this drive. I didn't realize how noisy my other two drives were untill I removed them. My computer is so quiet now it's almost eerie. I think though I'll still pick up the spinpoint and put the more quiet one in the HTPC.
Good to hear that it was what you were looking for. I find Seagates to be quiet but they have quite a "crunchy" seeking tone, something that the SpinPoints apparently lack.
Amazing I just walked into my computer room and was wondering why my comp wasnt running... it is. Usually I could hear the whine as soon as I opened the door. Man thats a quiet idle! Ya it is a little crunchy but its certainly not loud, just enough that i can tell the drive is doing something. But its still sitting out on my desk, I haven't mounted it yet. Like i said I beleive that there is software out there (either from manufacturers or third party, but IIRC the former), that can quiet down the seeks. I'll have to do some experimenting. But I still think i'll pickup a spinpoint too just to do some comparing.
IIRC, Seagate don't use the accoustic management software any more due to some legal complications I think that the SATA ones are locked to performance mode and PATA drives are locked onto quiet settings. I might be wrong though...
