Looking at 3.5" capacities 16-24TB, wanting least obtrusive sounding out of the bunch. Out of the game for a long time, my cough ReadyNas 314 has 4x2TB 2.5" drives which are very quiet.
Don't need to be that quiet, but also don't want to have a background shrieking noise, and a gong noise when the heads move.
The only correct answer.
It's a good starting point, but it does not tell the whole story. Ideally, you'd be able to see the spectral distribution of the noise for various access patterns. it's probably something that the manufacturers would have, but it's not something that you routinely find in the marketing literature for HDDs.
At the end of the day, the noise in the room will depend on what the file system does, how the drive interacts with the enclosure and how well the enclosure contains the noise.
don't want to have a background shrieking noise, and a gong noise when the heads move
shrieking noises only occur when the little hamster inside the drive gets his leg caught in the running wheel. a gong sound typically follows as his head hits the wheel. i hope you have been dropping food inside the tiny hole on top of the drive to keep his energy up.
Best to ask the question on r/datahoarder
Both are noisy, get a NAS, put it in your garage and run ethernet cabling to your garage.
Are you a Silent PC enthusiast?
There is no need to include a HDD in your everyday PC. Opt for SSDs instead. You'll appreciate the noticeable noise reduction.
Larger drives are more likely to shriek as they are pseudo-built and designed for datacenters and then converted to the consumer product.
Get a NAS & stick it in the garage. Create shared drives to have on your computer. Use SSD's in your computer.
Yes all of the above is done, all desktops / laptops are SSD's … NAS in insulated loft. I have experienced some crazy loud SATA enterprise drives in the data centre and was trying to avoid those ones I guess. Will ask on reddit. Thanks
I bought two Seagate Exos drives for my bedside NAS. I knew they would be a bit noisy, being data centre drives. They are even louder than I expected.
I have eight drives; a mix of 8TB, 20TB and 22TB WD Red Pro NAS drives. They are in a thin sheet metal PC case without acoustic insulation and with 4 Noctua fans running at 800 RPM. In normal operation (playing a UHD movie over network, handling email, playing music and managing photo library) the noise is not noticeable at 2 ~ 3m distance, unless you ensure the room is absolutely quiet and listen for activity. However, when a regular BRTFS scrub is running (all eight HDDs going flat out at ~200MB/s each), the seek noise is quite noticeable. You would not want to sleep in the same room, but I can sleep in the next room with the door open, while the scrub is going.
Most of the noise is due to aggressive seeking and that in turn will (to some extent) depend on the access patterns of the file system being used.
All drives have APM level set to "maximum performance", however the drives do not support AAM to control the acoustics.
On paper the dBA figures look fine and while there are difference between manufacturers and models, most drives end up being in the same ballpark. However, the dBA figure is the overall level and does not account for the spectral distribution. If you are unlucky a drive may have a peak at a frequency that matches the resonant frequency of some part of your enclosure and you'll end up with loads of noise. If that happens, you need to find out what is vibrating and damp that part or at least stop the transfer.
tl;dr: WD Red Pro drives are not very noisy under light load and get increasingly noisier as you trash them hard. Even at maximum noise, they are not too bad in a properly acoustically designed enclosure. I have three WD Red Pro/Red Plus drives in a Cooler Master Sileo case and I have to look at the LED to determine if there is disk activity during backup. I sit right next to that PC case - it's on the floor next to my desk.
For what it's worth, I have a few ancient 16GB and 200GB 2.5" drives that are noisier (just the HDD spinning noise alone) than any of the WD Red Pro 8TB ~ 22TB drives.
Look at the dBA part of the specification. This tells you how much sound they make.