Noisey 2.5 HDD (210Mb)

[tokyoracer]

Hey, got a bit of an issue with my HD that i installed. Works very nicely but seems to spin a bit louder then normal. I can put up with it but gets annoying. Is there any way of making it quieter. I thight about using a light dencity foam or somthing but can you think of better?
Regrds,
Chris

[amigagr]

i found that the seagate disks are the most quiet with my 1200
after a lot of disk i try and change. is this disk used from you first time? once i had a western digital 850mb which, after 3 years of use started to make more and more noise. at last it  droped dead just after i remove all data to a new one :-)

[Hyperspeed]

If you're using a 2.5" drive then you'll be in a desktop case which has vents in the top. This lets through the high frequency noise of the drive and is pretty unbearable.

I've tried Quantum, Hitachi and IBM and they're all very whiney.

(Note: Quantum Daytona Go-Drive is not Amiga compatible).

Seagate seem to be the quietest drives but are also the hottest. I sold my Seagate Barracuda 3.5" because I was worried about the severe heat it gave off.

Trouble with using sound absorbing material is that it'll block the natural airflow and might overheat your Amiga.

The best route nowadays is to get a Simpletech or Silicontech 2.5" ATA flash disk. This looks very much like a 2.5" laptop drive and has the screw holes in the side for fitting into an A1200/A600 cradle. However there is no motor inside, just a bunch of chips.

I've seen them in 448MB, 540MB, 800MB, 1GB and more sizes. I also saw a site with SCSI-1 versions.

They're half the height, noiseless, heatless, long lasting, impact resistant and have ultra-fast seek times.

[Piru]

Seagate seem to be the quietest drives but are also the hottest. I sold my Seagate Barracuda 3.5" because I was worried about the severe heat it gave off.

Can't say I agree about the heat: My 4 Seagate Barracudas (120, 200, 2 x 400) don't run particularily hot (any hotter than other brands). The 120GB one has been running 2.5 years and the 200GB one 1.3 years 24/7 without any problems.

Regarding 2.5": The thing I've found out is that sooner or later the drives die (I've had all 3 2.5" drives I've ever owned die on me), first starting to make that grinding noise. If you hear it, time to backup ASAP...

One massively irritating problem of some 2.5" drives seem to be some clonking noise they make, even when idle. The 2 Hitachi's had this at least. Maybe it's just a Hitachi thing, but it sure was annoying.

The best route nowadays is to get a Simpletech or Silicontech 2.5" ATA flash disk. ...

They're half the height, noiseless, heatless, long lasting, impact resistant and have ultra-fast seek times.

So they've overcome the problem of limited write times?

[Hyperspeed]

Well I'm talking about the older Seagate drives of around the 2GB-4GB size. Maybe the newer ones have evolved technologically.

I was once told the ping-pong ball style noise is due to the bearings failing. The drive can still operate in a limited capacity so you should backup right away.

An old IDE Quantum Fireball in a friend's PC died this way and I'm convinced it died due to being mounted vertically.

To me, if a disk is spinning vertically it is lob-sided and one half of the platter is always working against gravity, and thus the bearings.

It's just an opinion though and may not be the prime cause of death. Maybe that's just Windows and virtual memory!

:-D

As for the solid state drives, they're not as fast as hard disks in terms of data transfer. I think they were like 3MB/S but that's still ASynch-SCSI-1 speed and should more than satisfy the 2MB/S A1200 IDE interface.

Where they do excell would be in seek operations as there are no moving parts.

The literature says they are military spec so I doubt they are prone to the same sort of write limitations as Compact Flash - particularly as these are primarily for booting critical code off (as opposed to storing JPG pictures).

Being military spec they will also satisfy the highest criteria as set out by DoomMaster.

[Waccoon]

Older drives are whiney.  My Maxtor 85MB drive was always a screamer, but it finally drove me nuts so I got a Hitachi Travelstar 20GB for $50.  I cannot hear this thing at all except when it parks the heads.  Seriously.  Most drives these days have fluid dynamic bearings, and anything 5400 RPM or less is not going to make any real noise.  It's very, very cool, too.  I noticed right away that my CF Card reader is stone cold with the new drive, while my Maxtor made it quite warm.  Heck, I could feel the heat through the keyboard while typing.  I should've replaced the drive a while ago.

I'll never own anything with ball bearings again.  Even the ball bearing fans on my PC die like crazy, while the sleeve bearing fans seem to last forever.  :lol:

Now, just don't do what I did, and make three 1GB partitions.  My poor A1200 with 6megs of RAM crashed like crazy on bootup with Out of Memory errors.  I might get an 030 card and max out the memory at some point, but a 50MB boot partition and 250MB work partition will probably be more space than I'll ever need.  Ah, the good old days.

As for the solid state drives, they're not as fast as hard disks in terms of data transfer. I think they were like 3MB/S but that's still ASynch-SCSI-1 speed and should more than satisfy the 2MB/S A1200 IDE interface.

It depends on the card.  Most cheap cards are 1-2MB/s, but you can get some as fast as 15-20MB/s, and some of them actually run at thier rated speeds.  ;-)

[Hyperspeed]

15-20MB/S? WOOF!

I did see a Simpletech or Silicontech drive with 2GB of space but that was $2,000.

I always did prefer the days when games came on cartridge, disk/disc based mediums never had that full-on instant feeling.

It'd be nice to experience a solid state feel in a computer!

You'd be able to listen to MP3s in peace. I've often wondered if pets can be distressed about hard disks too... they hear ultrasound don't they!

[tokyoracer]

Mine is a seagate and so is my dads both of wich are in a desktop case. My dads 85 Mb one is very faint werr noise as mine is much the same but at least 2x as loud.

[darksun9210]

after having a look on mini-itx.com for sliline cd drives, i saw they did miniture 1.8" hard drives too that apparently fit the normal 2.5" connector.

i got bored of the cast off 2.5" drives i got from work. noisey, clonky, some just lost their partition information. most annoying. so i bit the bullet and bought a 1.8" drive.

but mini-itx were out of stock of their 20Gb's, Dabs.com didn't have the 20Gb's or the 40Gb's either, but they had some 60Gb drives...

anyway, it was to be the quietest drive i have ever used. even with my ear to the drive i can just hear the faint click of head movement. found an annoying hum though. but its my A1200 powersupply!

plus its just less than half the size of a 2.5"! :-D

so to sum up, its just a little bit bigger than a compactflash and IDE adapter. just about as quiet, and how many times the capacity? and no flash rewrite issue. and lets be honest here, how much faster is the improvment in seek time with a flash drive going to effect things? :-)

[Hyperspeed]

Well like I said, I don't think the Simpletech/SiliconTech drives have writing limitations.

The benefits of an ATA Flash Drive over a hard disk are:

1. Low power consumption - great for projects like laptops, CD32/SX32, Client servers or in-car systems.

2. Next to instant boot times, directory listings ultra fast and no need to defrag!

3. Can withstand extreme heat and impact so you needn't worry at all about a sensitive little disk warping or the bearings aging. Particularly in enclosed spaces with no cooling.

4. Completely silent, not even a hum. No whining motor and clickity heads.

5. Extremely low profile, about 5mm thick

6. Unlike 2.5"/1.8" they come in SCSI varieties which means low CPU overhead, chains of up to 7 of them. A solid state mini-RAID would be pretty cool!

:-)

EDIT: HUH? My first edit didn't appear...

Anyway, I was gonne add that having a 60GB 1.8" drive would mean you could hold Aminet and every Amiga game ever made in the palm of your hand. Pretty tempting even for an anti-harddisk preacher.

:-D

[amigagr]

tokyoracer wrote:
Mine is a seagate and so is my dads both of wich are in a desktop case. My dads 85 Mb one is very faint werr noise as mine is much the same but at least 2x as loud.

85mb? don't you think this is a miracle that can even work seans now. it's time to upgrate though.

[Piru]

no need to defrag!

That's nonsense. Just becuse seeks are fast doesn't mean fragmentation won't be a problem.

Filesystems need some cpu time to sort out the filesystem structures, and the more fragmented the filesystem is the more CPU time is spent there.

If you install flash disk drive to a PIO driven controller, any CPU time that is spent elsewhere is out from the transfer performance, too.

[tokyoracer]

that HDD has never been a problem but just used that as an example. I still havent had a good way of fixing my 210Mb drive which is making a bigger noise then my dads amiga. thats what i was saying... so im pleeding for some help!

[Hyperspeed]

I'd help but I didn't know what to do myself!

You could try buying sound-absorbing mats and compensating for airflow with a heatpipe from an overclockers shop.

You could also fit a 3.5" drive internally with a splitter from the floppy drive power and a 2.5"-3.5" IDE adaptor. 3.5" will probably have a less ear-piercing whine than 2.5".

Alternatively there are apps on Aminet that can switch off the drive motor when not in use but that can cause problems for a Boot partition. Your best bet there would be to have the drive copied into RAD: and then the motor shut off.

Be careful when you insulate that heat is controlled and you don't start a fire when the machine is left unattended. It might be cheaper to get one of the other drives suggested on this thread as opposed to suffering with the 210MB drive.

Piru: Why would fragmentation be such a problem for a small drive with 100x faster seek speeds than a platter based solution? Some of them are SCSI and would be DMA with a SCSI-IV kit. I suppose even ATA would be faster since you don't have to wait for the head to align with the correct track, delayed by the rotation of the disc and blocks strewn at varying radius.

They do say a boot partition should be placed in the first few MB of a hard disk because that's where it's faster. This would be more consistent on solid state since there is nothing spinning in circles, it's all there in a central hub of circuitry!

Just out of curiosity though, the data on the outer edge of a platter spins fastest so does the RDB start on the circumference or the spindle?

[amigagr]

210mb hd is older than 1994 too. better find a new one, for start just backup all your data fore safety and keep using the old one 'till the end... i think that a new drive will be faster too and after a try you will never return to the old one :-)