Do bigger HDDs make more noise than a smaller one?

Cyberspirit · January 6, 2018

Hey, I've been thinking about switching my two 1TB drives out for a single 4-6TB drive for all my backups and my small home server.

The question is how loud do bigger drives get compared to a smaller 1TB drive?

My two drives like to make a lot of noise even with padding under the case's feet so, I wouldn't want to get a big drive and have even more noise.

The way I'd like to set it up is by moving all my games and frequently used documents to a bigger 1-2 TB SSD and just have my backups and my server on the HDD that hopefully won't spin up constantly.

Now, this might be a stupid idea so, feel free to tell me if you have a better suggestion.

ExplosiveSloths · January 6, 2018

Generally they ru at a slower speed, I'd say no tbh.

Krazes · January 6, 2018

Good question, I'd say no as well ^.

SageOfSpice · January 6, 2018

Well, I bought a WD 500GB a few years back, and recently bought a 3TB Hitachi.

I personally haven't noticed any difference in noise levels. The Hitachi doesn't have any acoustic management on it, whereas the WD did. Even with the Hitachi zip-tied to the bottom of my case, it doesn't cause too much of a racket. I don't often hear it over my case fans unless my case is touching something.

glitchmaster0001 · January 6, 2018

How old are the 1TB drives in your setup? typically, from my experience. I noticed that the older drives tend to be louder than newer hard drives. Also the older hard drives of the same capacity tend to be heavier than the newer drives as well. But what the others said is true as well. Larger capacity hard drives tend to have slower RPMs so it would logically make less noise than a higher RPM hard drive

Cyberspirit · January 6, 2018

15 minutes ago, glitchmaster0001 said:

How old are the 1TB drives in your setup? typically, from my experience. I noticed that the older drives tend to be louder than newer hard drives.

I have two 1TB WD10EZEX and, one of them is around 8 months old and, the other one is like 6 and, I bought them brand new so they shouldn't have any issues like that.

For some reason, my newer one is louder than the other not sure what's up with that.

Ps.: Coming from a 32GB HDD I had no idea 1TB was nothing these days.