Which hard drives are the most quiet

[kennethk]

Due to my budget I can't go with a 4tb ssd as much as I want to my drives are starting to click so I'm wondering what drives would be best that are the quietst and are good at cooling for media servers.

[Kc7vwc]

I have two Synology NAS. Both are using Seagate IronWolf 5400rpm drives. Can't hear a thing, and both are on a shelf about 4 feet away from my bed. 

One NAS is a dedicated Plex server, and it has 2x 6TB drives. 

The other is dedicated to family photo backups, and it has 2x 2TB drives. 

 

I've had the 2TB drives for about 4 years now. 

The 6TB drives will be 2 years in February. 

[kennethk]

3 hours ago, Kc7vwc said:

I have two Synology NAS. Both are using Seagate IronWolf 5400rpm drives. Can't hear a thing, and both are on a shelf about 4 feet away from my bed. 

One NAS is a dedicated Plex server, and it has 2x 6TB drives. 

The other is dedicated to family photo backups, and it has 2x 2TB drives. 

 

I've had the 2TB drives for about 4 years now. 

The 6TB drives will be 2 years in February. 

Being that they are 5400 what types of write speeds are you looking at?

[Kc7vwc]

19 hours ago, kennethk said:

Being that they are 5400 what types of write speeds are you looking at?

I haven't done any testing, honestly. 

Best I can say is that for my usage, they're fine.  

I went for space & stability before speed. 

[prembo]

The Samsung (I think its this model  https://productz.com/en/samsung-spinpoint-f3-desktop-class-hd103sj-1-tb/p/K2BKP )  I have now is  far quieter than the Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital drives I have  used in the past. 

[cmndr]

5400RPM is usually the key to "quiet" or at least a good starting point when doing research.

For write speed concerns 1. Avoid SMR drives. 2. Consider a NAS solution that has some concept of caching (even if it's just 10 seconds in RAM, getting sorted out before going to the disk).

 

Cooling usually isn't a big issue for HDDs and people often have them UNDER their ideal temperature.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/

If the concern is power draw... 5400RPM.