Thermal and Acoustics

Heat and sound are also two very important factors in drive performance especially when considering where they will be used. A loud hard drive that becomes warm very quickly may not be the best choice for home theater PCs or any PC without adequate cooling and the noise alone could be a bit annoying. Take a look at how each drive performed as far as heat and noise output goes.

Thermal

Drive Operating Temperatures

The 7200.8 is one of the hottest running drives on the list. While sitting idle, it produces heat of 42 degrees Celsius, as hot as the 10,000RPM Raptor.

Drive Operating Temperatures

During heavy activity, it runs slightly cooler than the Raptor as well as the DiamondMax 10 and 7K400 at 46 degrees. Though not really an issue when it comes to recommended operating temperatures of each drive, the heat that these drives give off can affect the overall temperature and performance of an entire system. We do recommend that users install adequate cooling solutions in their systems to keep temperatures down as much as possible.

Acoustics

To measure the sound output of each drive, we have taken decibel readings as well as recordings of each drive at their startup phase and the sound output while there is disk activity. The recordings can be downloaded below in MP3 format.

Hitachi 7K400: startup | activity
Maxtor DiamondMax 10: startup | activity
Maxtor DiamondMax 16: startup | activity
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9: startup | activity
Samsung SpinPoint 1604N: startup | activity
Samsung SpinPoint 1614C: startup | activity
Samsung SpinPoint 1614N: startup | activity
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7: startup | activity
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: startup | activity
Western Digital Raptor: startup | activity

Noise Comparison

The loudest drives on the list were Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 (300GB) and DiamondMax 16 as they churned away during Windows XP startup. the 7200.8 and even the 7200.7 were much quieter, but not as quiet as all three of the Samsung drives. They produced noise no louder than about 51.5 dBA at startup and no louder than 52.4 dBA during peak activity.

Real World Tests - Multitasking Performance Final Words
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  • PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    mjz5: With our nForce4 platform there is an option under the drive controllers options tab called "Enable command queuing". By checking this option and restarting the system, command queuing will be enabled. Some boards, however, enable NCQ/TCQ by default through the BIOS. You may want to check with your motherboard manual on that.

    Take care,

    Purav
  • mjz5 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Nighteye2 has a good question. How does NCQ work with RAID arrays? Is it better, worse???

    How would I know if TCQ is enabled on my 74 raptor?
  • xsilver - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    #21 LOL --- you wouldnt want that space anyways even if it was there.... its cant be guaranteed reliable so would you trust 100gb's of your drive that could die at any moment???
  • quorm - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I have one of the 300gb 7200.8 drives. It's mentioned in the article that all of the 7200.8 drives use a 3x133gb platter configuration. I was wondering if there is any hack to allow access to the remaining 100gb of disk space. Anyone?
  • AtaStrumf - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Hey, where did all the WD drives (apart from Raptor obviously) go??? I can get a 200 GB PATA model pretty cheap, so I'm seriously considering it. Any advice anyone?
  • n7 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Thanx for the review guys :)

    flatblastard: I'd agree.

    The Raptors may not win all the benches, but i find they feel so much snappier than my other 7200RPM drives.

    I certainly wouldn't mind adding a 400 Gb Seagate to my collection though :)

  • bob661 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Can you guys post a UT2004 for load time graph please.
  • flatblastard - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I'm using the raptor for my OS, and the 250GB seagate 7200.8 for everything else. I really can't tell which one is faster at loading games...but the raptor is MUCH quicker loading anything else.
  • Icehawk - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Where were the heavier real-world multi-tasking tests like in the Intel DC previews? In those articles it appeared that NCQ offered some performance boost in heavy I/O situations - here it seems to offer zero benefit.
  • Houdani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I dunno. Neither the Seagate nor the Maxtor NCQ drive really impressed me. They didn't stand out from the peleton. For most performance needs, I'd have to give the yellow jersey to the Raptor, although the idle heat is a noteworthy ding.

    For extra capacity one of the larger models would be prudent, but for a primary drive the Raptor is fairly impressive.

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