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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  • StormGod - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Hey Anandtech, please make sure your pages are 100% Firefox compatible! While were on the subject, you should really strive to make your pages HTML 4.01 compliant or XHTML 1.0 compliant.
  • cosmotic - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I was going to comment on the headings too...
  • SLIM - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    The shading and color fill behind the headings and drive names is also missing in firefox. You can highlight the column headings to read what they are supposed to say in firefox. Glad I downloaded that ieview extension now.
  • bigboxes - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Yup. The column headers for these tables do not show up in Firefox.
  • shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    the column labels don't show up in firefox.
  • shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

  • PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    segagenesis: It seems to be an issue with our sound meter or noise reduction process. We will look into it for our next review. Besides the echo, the recordings should be clear enough to differentiate how each drive sounds.

    Nighteye2: Your requests will be fulfilled soon. :)
  • Nighteye2 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    You know, with all this talk about NCQ, 1 question has not yet been answered: how does it work with RAID? Can you use NCQ on a RAID system?

    Also, I'd like to see these tests run on a RAID system, see the performance advantage it gives. Maybe compare 2 cheap, somewhat slower drives in a RAID array against a single HD that you can get for the same price?
  • segagenesis - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    The benchmarks are hardly cut and dry yes, but I do enjoy the fact Seagate has a 5 year warranty on drives. This after seeing the industry at one point was putting out 1-year warranty stock on drives and if you paid extra, 3 years.

    Raptors are the fastest drives ive ever seen but the lack of space keeps them from being all inclusive. I was kind of suprised that the 7200.8 beat out the Raptor as far as game loading went!

    Whats with the weird echo-ish sound recordings of the hard drive noise? What on earth did you use to do this?
  • FreshPrince - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    man, I need to learn how to use this...anyways...I bought 40 of these drives for my company.

    16 goes into one raid and another 16 goes into another raid. So far so good, I hear no complaints from my tech guys.

    Also, I took 2 and used it as a DFS file server, it's handling 75 users no problems. :-)

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