Hard Drive choice.

[Duggeh]

I'm going to build a new PC to replace my crumbling AthlonXP system, I've sorted out almost everything I'm going to go for, but I'm still having some indecision over the OS drive. Either the OCZ Core 64Gig SSD, or the Western Digital Velociraptor. I had the 74gig raptor in my primary Athlon XP system before it went unreliable and I was forced onto this crappy shuttle. The Raptor74 is so very crunchy noisy these days, I really don't want the Velociraptor to end up being that way, in spite of the claims that it is quieter than the previous raptors, and of course the SSD is silent.

The rest of the PC is going to be as quiet as I can realistically achieve on an LGA775 platform and noise will hopefully be well under 25db so the last thing I want is a clunky drive, but the 300gig capacity and superior write speeds, and read speeds and seak times being far better during writes, make me want to go for the Raptor. Noise and read/seek time not-under-load tempt me to the SSD. Capacity is an issue too, 74 gigs was fine on my previosu system but having a new pc means I can catch up on games that I've missed out on like farcry, bioshock, tiberium wars etc, and those have got big installs.

Anyone here got a Velociraptor and can comment on the noise level? Any opinions on the choice? Only other thing I'm not set on is a new monitor but thats going to wait a little time anyway.

[fordgtlover]

I don't know about either of these drives, but what power supply and case are you going to use?

In my ongoing search for a reasonably priced quiet PC the power supply fan is now the only thing that I can hear apart from the very occasional low level read/write noise of my HD.

As a possible alternative to a silent drive, have you considered a quite HD enclosure?

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/harddrivesolutions

[strid3r]

Have you considered going SSD with a large (and quiet) secondary drive?

[aardvark baguette]

I think if you're trying to build a rig worthy of the velociraptor, the noise level will be moot, since the fans will likely be louder (assuming you use air to cool the computer). I've got 2 150GB raptors in raid 0, and even though they make some noise on start up, they're not too bad during use. The fans in my case make much more noise.

Supposedly the new velociraptor is just as fast as my 2 raided raptors too. I think its performance is likely fairly close to most SSD drives. Vista + OSX are only now starting to redesign their packets to work better with SSD, according to this.

I've heard that some SSD, including OCZ can have unexplained data loss.

At this point in time, I would only go SSD in a tower if you are hellbent on speed. Not as a reliability option.

[Duggeh]

I don't know about either of these drives, but what power supply and case are you going to use?

In my ongoing search for a reasonably priced quiet PC the power supply fan is now the only thing that I can hear apart from the very occasional low level read/write noise of my HD.

As a possible alternative to a silent drive, have you considered a quite HD enclosure?

Quiet PC UK - Hard Drives, HDD silencers and Optical Drives

I'm staying with my Thermaltake Xaser III case. PSU will be my current Zalman 500 watt one, only if it proves to be insufficient will I replace it, its the only part of my current machine thats anywhere near new and I'm lead to believe that it'll do okay.

A hard drive enclosure is a possibility, but it'd mean removing one of my current 5 inch bay devices, two are expendable in practical terms though. Of course, things like that add on and add up.

Have you considered going SSD with a large (and quiet) secondary drive?

Yes, I have, but the capacity issue is a secondary one, is the issues of seek time under load and possible high noise during access for the raptor that are larger concerns. My music drive is 320 gigs and has more than enough space free, 250 gig for the storage and video drive, and thats also got enough space because I dont tend to keep all the video I download. By those standards, the 300 gig of the Velociraptor is going to be more than enough.

I think if you're trying to build a rig worthy of the velociraptor, the noise level will be moot, since the fans will likely be louder (assuming you use air to cool the computer). I've got 2 150GB raptors in raid 0, and even though they make some noise on start up, they're not too bad during use. The fans in my case make much more noise.

Supposedly the new velociraptor is just as fast as my 2 raided raptors too. I think its performance is likely fairly close to most SSD drives. Vista + OSX are only now starting to redesign their packets to work better with SSD, according to this.

I've heard that some SSD, including OCZ can have unexplained data loss.

At this point in time, I would only go SSD in a tower if you are hellbent on speed. Not as a reliability option.

I think that the terminology youve got is backwards, the hard drive is always the biggest bottleneck in any system faster than say, a thunderbird core athlon, particularly when it comes to the general responsiveness of the OS, and so, for me, is of far more important concern (and difficult concern) than the CPU (Core2 Q9450 or 9550 for this build). I'll have very little fan noise at all, the case fans in the Xaser are whisper quiet, only very slightly louder than the PSU fan. I'm going with an aftermarket passive cooling for the ATI HD4850, so the only fans turning will be the CPU fan (16db) PSU fan, and however many case fans it takes to generate negative internal case pressure. Which should hopefully be 2. Vista and OSX optimisations for SSD aren't relevent because I'm stayign with XP for the time being. Maybe a dual boot with Vista, to see if I can stand it.

I'm also considering sticking with the old raptor 74 for a wee while, to see if OCZ drops prices or does worse as competition for mainstream SSDs picks up.

[naamanf]

I would go with the Velociraptor. It should be quiet since it is a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" cooling enclosure. Speed wise it beats out some of the SSD drives for read and write times.

As for the OCZ SSDs I read somewhere that they were having quality issues and a rather high failure rate.

[Dusty Chalk]

ultimate silent linux "box"

Of course, they cheated: they put the disk drives in the next room.