joelbaby

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Hi,

Is a 10Krpm raptor noticeably noisier than a standard HD?
Can any simple measures be taken to quieten down the noise?

Joel
 

asdasd123123

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It's much louder when it spins up, but the idle sound is equal or less than that of my 320gb drive.

With two drives in raid on my system, it's Considerably louder when Working, but nothing that disturbs me, since it's not a constant whine.

It's a special crackling noise, not very loud but noticable, and with time you find to enjoy it, it's like a Harley or something =P
 

asdasd123123

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Are those mounted on their sides?

If so, they're gonna break MUCH sooner than normal, HD bearings doesn't work sideways.

Trust me, I've had enough Compaq's, HP's and the likes at my support desk to know. (They all mount drives standing or sideways...)
 

ethel

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I have two drives - a 74GB raptor and a 74GB SCSI 15K. The raptor is louder.

As others have mentioned, the idle sound is not really noticeable, but the seek sound is quite loud - it has a low pitch, coffee grinder noise when seeking. It is actually quite an agreeable sound, kind of old school if you like.

If you want to reduce this significantly you can suspend the drive, which means that the drive is not fastened to the case, but suspended by elastic. Suspending the drive makes a huge difference to both idle and seek noise as the vibrations aren't magnified by the case. I have a P150 case so this feature is built in, but there are websites out there that will explain how to do this home-brewed.
 

hannibal

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I have 150GB raptor and two 250GB WD. The Raptor is noticeable louder, but Antec P180 does keep the noise very tolerable. So don't use very cheap enclosure, and you will be fine.
 

Andrius

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I have 2x150GB Raptors, 2x200GB WD JD series 7200 SATA, 2x120GB WD JB series PATA...

In the same case the drive you hear is the one that has activity.
Disk to disk copying is noticable on all six disks.
The raptor is quite a bit louder when booting,
but when copying from one to another the noise level is about the same.

I notice both but it doesn't really bother me.
 

Andrius

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Another question is how many here have Raptors in Raid setup? I had them in Raid 0 but when I built my new setup I went with 2 seperate and put Xp on one and Vista on the other, works fine but I notice a slight speed decrease without the Raid,I miss it some...

I tried it for a few weeks. But there was no real advantage to it. My nforce4 chipset appears to be the reason. I now use one for the OS and the other for page file and project files.
 

babaghan

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I don't mind the sound of my Raptors. In fact, I like how they sound :D Soldier - I have 2 Raptors in RAID Zero for my OS and 2 in RAID Zero for my application software. I really should have bench tested the Raptors before RAID and after, now I really can't say what the specific performance difference is...

Vista 32bit | Core 2 Duo E6700 @ 2.66 GHz | BFG GeForce 8800 GTX | Patriot EP 2X1GB PC2-8500 DDR2-1066 CL5-5-5-9 | 3ware 9650SE-4LPML RAID Controller with BBU | 150GB Raptor x2 RAID 0 - OS/Swap | 150GB Raptor x2 RAID 0 - Data | 150GB Raptor - Backup | SB X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro Series | Dell E207WFP & Samsung SyncMaster 213T | Asus Striker Extreme | PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW-SR | Silverstone Temjin TJ07 | Zalman CNPS9700 NT | 3DMark06: 10294 (1280 x 1024)
 

asdasd123123

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I raid my 36gb drives, and I don't store anything important on them.
Wich is something you NEED to consider, don't store your work on a raid 0!

You will get the read speed of dual raptors with raid 1, but lose half the space.
 

vylo

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I have a Zalman 9700 cooling fan, and I can't hear a damn thing over it. Can barely even hear my DVD drive spin. So, if you have a lot of fans (or one massive one), don't worry.
 

enPhotic

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Going from a 7200 rpm Barracuda to a single 74gb Raptor was a big difference. Then doing two Raptors in RAID-0 only felt like a slight gain, even though my HD Tach benchies made it look like quite a lot. Noise isn't noticeable if you accompany them with a power munching video card.
 

proof

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I have 3 Raptor Xs and 2 Raptor 150s. They are not that noisy at all. They are all in a stripe (HELL YEAH) and the noise doesn't bother me at all.
 

nabuhonodozor

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hi,
Ive just change case and now I can hear my raptors quite well but just at the seeking time. My previous case have elastic hdd mounting and raptors were completely silenced.
 

sealman

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I have Six different rigs up and running. All but two of them don't have Raptors in them. Disk to disk copying is noticable on all disks. The raptor is quite a bit louder when booting. But it also depends on the model you get. I have afew of them all. The loudest is the WD1500AHFD, it has a lot to do with the window.
Web site
WD1500AHFD
Idle 39 dBA Seek 46 dBA
WD1500ADFD
Idle 29 dBA Seek 36 dBA

My reading
WD1500AHFD
idle 41 dBA seek 49 dBA

WD1500ADFD
idle 29 dBA seek 37 dBA

A big differents

If anyone would like I will check my 36 and 74.

Sealman