I was wondering from your experience, what is a good quiet laptop hard drive? I want to find out what 7200 rpm and 5400 rpm laptop drives have the least noise and vibration especially in idle basic spinning mode etc.
Right now I am using a seagate momentus and it almost sounds like a constant fan is on, I don’t like it and want some advice on a more quiet 7200 rpm laptop drive. I may even consider going to 5400rpm to reduce noise although I will loose performance with that route.
Heading to Micro Center in 15min to try out a few drives, I’ll ask the staff if they have any ideas, I am leaning towards the WD scorpio line, trying to stay at 7200rpm’s if I can.
Learning that it has just as much to do with the actual enclosure as it does with the hard drive. The laptop I use is the dell latitude E6520 and I have to say the enclosure is not great, sort of makes any hard drive sound like a fan is on, I opted for the 5400rpm scorpio blue and it is a bit better but am returning it today because it has a distracting on off type of whooshing sound compared to seagates more constant woosh in idle, seek noise is very quiet though and in a better designed drive bay it is probably very quiet.
Any ideas on this would be great, and yes I am able to get the latitude to work okay as a DAW but not a main DAW it wont have the best latency in the world but it does the trick for me, it’s main use is for business.
SSD drives are way to expensive at the moment I could not live with anything less than 320gb so I’ll have to wait although it will solve this problem instantly when the price is right.
Trying to figure out which drive to try next any ideas??
I was in the same situation - upgraded my MacBook Pro from the original 80GB drive to a Momentus 7200 (500GB) but I disliked the noise and vibrations. So I ordered a Scorpio blue with 750GB.
Well, the problem here was that the drives has some kind of integrated energy saving feature which causes the drive to permanently spin up and down. It caused my Laptop to freeze every 10 seconds or something like that for a short moment, even while surfing. I did some research on that and stepped over countless threads about exactly my problem. For normal Laptop use it can work to tweak that energy saving option with some fancy third-party tools. I don’t have the correct terms for those things in my head, just google it. Well, but then I used my MacBook for recording some music - and the recording process was interrupted always after a minute or two - “too many tracks”.
Well, nothing helped - I switched the drives again, so now I am with the Momentus and, beside noise - I am very happy with it. My “I want that” drive is the new Momentus 7200 with 750GB which seems to be very fast and somewhat more quiet.
Yep I ended up staying with the seagate momentus and just dealing with the noise, it performs well enough. I tried some 5400 rpm drives and they were much quieter especially the hitachi travelstart that is a quiet 5400rpm drive, but not fast enough for me, Looking forward to when 500GB SSD are around 600.00 that’s my jump in point.
After much research and building my own desktop my conclusion is that it’s less the hard drive and more how it is housed. I good housing in any pc or laptop will deal with the vibrations and noise very well. Seeing as laptops are so close to us, a little vibration and noise must be expected to some degree if you want the speed of 7200rpm drives.