Quiet hard drive

[Lare111]

I've had my WD Blue 1TB for almost two years and it's always been loud at idle. It's actually the loudest component in my PC. Is there any 7200 RPM hard drives that are quiet? 1TB SSDs cost too much...

 

My case is Fractal Design Define Mini C and I've added some extra sound dampening material around the HDD cage which helped a little. Resonating isn't a problem.

[iRileyx]

Look into 5400RPM drives. you can't really get a "quiet" 7200RPM, atleast that i know of.

[simson0606]

you can look at a 2.5 inch wd black (or equivalent) 2.5 inch drives are often much quieter than their 3.5 inch counterparts. 

[Bananasplit_00]

well i cant even hear my Toshiba disk at idle, and its a 7200rpm 64mb cashe 1TB disk but you could look into getting a laptop disk or something?

[c00lFD]

9 minutes ago, Lare111 said:

I've had my WD Blue 1TB for almost two years and it's always been loud at idle. It's actually the loudest component in my PC. Is there any 7200 RPM hard drives that are quiet? 1TB SSDs cost too much...

 

My case is Fractal Design Define Mini C and I've added some extra sound dampening material around the HDD cage which helped a little. Resonating isn't a problem.

 I think something about your WD Blue might be wrong because I can't even hear mine at all at idle.

[Lare111]

Yes, I think my HDD could be faulty. It's hard to describe the sound because English isn't my native language but it sounds like dry bearing or something like that. I don't have any other WD hard drive to compare so it's hard to say. It doesn't show any errors in Crystal Disk Info.

[WhatsTheWifiPassword]

a quiet hard drive would be a SSD or a Flash drive 

[c00lFD]

Just now, WhatsTheWifiPassword said:

a quiet hard drive would be a SSD or a Flash drive 

Well then that's not a hard drive

 

[WhatsTheWifiPassword]

Just now, c00lFD said:

Well then that's not a hard drive

 

but sure is quiet ... 

[ProjectBox153]

I have a couple 1TB WD Blue 7200RPM drives that are both quiet. If those aren't quiet enough, I'd suggest a slower 5400RPM drive.

[Lare111]

My friend has a Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM. I'll pay him a visit tomorrow and listen if it's quieter than my WD Blue and if it is, I'll buy a new hard drive. Either Seagate Barracuda or Toshiba 1TB P300 which is also pretty cheap at 50€ and many people say it's very quiet.

 

My hard drive is actually as loud as running 1200 RPM case fan at max speed but the noise is different, not humming. I don't know the English word to describe it. According to Google translator it would be something like "dry rasp or rustle"...

 

 

[Lare111]

So my friend's Seagate was much quieter than my WD Blue even though they both are 7200 RPM. I'm starting to think that my hard drive is faulty. However that Seagate was still a little bit too noisy but I think it was mostly resonating noise.

 

I'll buy WD Blue 1TB 5400 RPM which should be quiet. I think I'll also buy Kingston A400 120GB which is on sale for 44€. Then I will have 640 GB of SSD storage for Windows, programs and games and quiet 1TB storage for photos, videos and some games I won't play often.

[Spotty]

Have a look in to rubber or anti-vibration HDD mounts and whether or not your case will support them. They may help to dampen some of the noise from spinning platters.

While it will only help while idle, you can also look at the advanced power options in Windows settings to schedule your HDD to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity.

[Lare111]

30 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Have a look in to rubber or anti-vibration HDD mounts and whether or not your case will support them. They may help to dampen some of the noise from spinning platters.

While it will only help while idle, you can also look at the advanced power options in Windows settings to schedule your HDD to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity.

My case has anti-vibration screws but they don't really do anything because it's not resonating.

 

I eventually ordered a WD Blue 2TB 5400RPM for 70€. I found some benchmarks and it's actually pretty fast for a 5400RPM HDD. I think the higher density of 2TB hard drive helps here. According to benchmarks read and write speeds were around 165MB/s. It should also be quieter than my current 7200RPM hard drive.

[grangervoldemort]

On 12/23/2017 at 10:05 AM, Lare111 said:

My case has anti-vibration screws but they don't really do anything because it's not resonating.

 

I eventually ordered a WD Blue 2TB 5400RPM for 70€. I found some benchmarks and it's actually pretty fast for a 5400RPM HDD. I think the higher density of 2TB hard drive helps here. According to benchmarks read and write speeds were around 165MB/s. It should also be quieter than my current 7200RPM hard drive.

How has this worked out for you? any stuttering due to HDD during game play? What about during loading? Apparently:
WD uses very aggressive head parking timers on their laptop and 5400 RPM desktop drives. After like 10-15 seconds of inactivity, it will park the heads. When this happens and Windows needs to access the HDD again, Windows will freeze while it waits the half second or so for the heads to unpark. Unfortunately, this timeout is baked into the drive's firmware - there's no Windows setting you can change to lengthen it.