Quiet Hard Drive

[Anjin San]

My main photo drive on my Mac Studio is an OWC Thunderbay mini which is very quiet. Beyond BB for offsite…I've been using a series of Seagate 2.5" 4TB BackupPlus USB drives…as well as an OWC SSD and SanDisk SSD for backing up the RAID and internal studio drive, the latter two are pretty new. The Seagates though have been running for between 3 and 5 years and while they're completely silent they're getting up there in hard drive years so I'm starting to wonder if they might be getting to the end of their useful life…plus they're pretty slow although that's not really a consideration for backup drives. I'm not sure whether to just get a bunch of the now current model 4 TB ones and keep my current multiple CarbonCopyCloner backup jobs or to just get a big spinning drive and do one job daily for the photos and a weekly job for everything else. My sole gripe about the single large drive is that it might or might not be silent.

I'm not looking to put up a NAS since the RAID does that for me now and is shared to the various other devices in the house…it's the file server in addition to the main LR machine…and while I could run a long USB cable to an external from the closet that's a pain as there's no easy route to the closet in the office. So…looking for a quiet 14TB or so drive on Amazon I see a couple options…Seagate, WD Elements, WD MyBook, and then a bunch of brands you've never heard of which aren't going to be on the list. Does anybody have one of these and if so what sort of noise level does it make? I looked at the Seagate and WD sites and naturally there's no useful info there on db levels…so either an evaluation of relative noise level in a quiet room or a dB level (there's an app on Apple Watch and a free app for iPhones on the App Store) would be useful. My app tells me it's 29B in the middle of the office with the A/C running in the house and about 30-31 dB right next to the OWC Thunderbay mini.

I might end up with a NAS one of these days anyway…although that would require a reconfiguration of the office so it could go into the closet and while I haven't heard any of the Synology or other brands in question but I'm guessing that they're loud enough to need to go into the closet (or perhaps the spare bedroom closet and run a cable over to a switch in the office for connection…and if I ever need more than 12TB just getting a 3.5 inch RAID from OWC is a lot simpler than the NAS would be but it would likely need to go into the closet as well. The external would likely be on or under the desk, hence my question on noise levels there.

Thanks.

 

[JP Onstwedder]

I have an OWC Mercury Elite Pro 16 TB. Noisiest drive I’ve ever heard. I asked their support team who confirmed the noise level is ‘normal’. It’s loud enough to interrupt conversation so definitely avoid that one! A Seagate backup plus drive was much quieter. WD Red drives in a Synology NAS are also quite noisy when it’s running synchronisation tasks, much less so in normal use. I’m about to add an expansion unit with Toshiba drives; will report back once that’s up an running in a few weeks.

 

[Nimi]

My main photo drive on my Mac Studio is an OWC Thunderbay mini which is very quiet. Beyond BB for offsite…I've been using a series of Seagate 2.5" 4TB BackupPlus USB drives…as well as an OWC SSD and SanDisk SSD for backing up the RAID and internal studio drive, the latter two are pretty new. The Seagates though have been running for between 3 and 5 years and while they're completely silent they're getting up there in hard drive years so I'm starting to wonder if they might be getting to the end of their useful life…plus they're pretty slow although that's not really a consideration for backup drives. I'm not sure whether to just get a bunch of the now current model 4 TB ones and keep my current multiple CarbonCopyCloner backup jobs or to just get a big spinning drive and do one job daily for the photos and a weekly job for everything else. My sole gripe about the single large drive is that it might or might not be silent.

I'm not looking to put up a NAS since the RAID does that for me now and is shared to the various other devices in the house…it's the file server in addition to the main LR machine…and while I could run a long USB cable to an external from the closet that's a pain as there's no easy route to the closet in the office. So…looking for a quiet 14TB or so drive on Amazon I see a couple options…Seagate, WD Elements, WD MyBook, and then a bunch of brands you've never heard of which aren't going to be on the list. Does anybody have one of these and if so what sort of noise level does it make? I looked at the Seagate and WD sites and naturally there's no useful info there on db levels…so either an evaluation of relative noise level in a quiet room or a dB level (there's an app on Apple Watch and a free app for iPhones on the App Store) would be useful. My app tells me it's 29B in the middle of the office with the A/C running in the house and about 30-31 dB right next to the OWC Thunderbay mini.

I might end up with a NAS one of these days anyway…although that would require a reconfiguration of the office so it could go into the closet and while I haven't heard any of the Synology or other brands in question but I'm guessing that they're loud enough to need to go into the closet (or perhaps the spare bedroom closet and run a cable over to a switch in the office for connection…and if I ever need more than 12TB just getting a 3.5 inch RAID from OWC is a lot simpler than the NAS would be but it would likely need to go into the closet as well. The external would likely be on or under the desk, hence my question on noise levels there.

Thanks.

Our server room has a few loud hard-drives, but we have recently sound-proofed it (professionally) and it works great. Wasn't expensive: acoustic panels, carpet, some foam, and no cracks.

 

[Replytoken]

I used to use a WD 3.5" 7200rpm drive in a third party enclosure as one of my main external drives and the fan, which was switchable, was quite noisy. That drive has been replaced by three WD Easystore and Elements drives (8, 8 & 10TB) which are a lot quieter. I do not know if WD is still doing this , but the drives I bought were WD Reds that were placed in their own retail enclosures (i.e. Elements and Easystore for Best Buy) rather than drives from their more affordable lines. They vertically vent and since the drives were originally designed for network storage, they tend to run (slower @5400rpm and) reasonably quiet,. These drives are not left online or used constantly, but when they are used, I am usually moving GB's of data, so I cannot say how they would sound if in constant use. I suspect that you could search the web for some of the tech forums where people are frequently posting about these kinds of "repackaged" equipment to see if a 14TB Elements drive is worth considering.

Good luck,

--Ken

 

[Viseguy]

Seems like total read/writes to SSD drives has reached a point that they can be used reliably for years, its why I combined two 4TB firecuda drives as my working folder on my hard drive. If your main issue in noise, look at the SSD NAS offerings, while not cheap I'm sure, noise should not be an issue.

 

[Ralph]

I have an OWC Mercury Elite Pro 16 TB. Noisiest drive I’ve ever heard. I asked their support team who confirmed the noise level is ‘normal’. It’s loud enough to interrupt conversation so definitely avoid that one! A Seagate backup plus drive was much quieter. WD Red drives in a Synology NAS are also quite noisy when it’s running synchronisation tasks, much less so in normal use. I’m about to add an expansion unit with Toshiba drives; will report back once that’s up an running in a few weeks.

When I bought my 2 drive enclosure I purchased Toshiba drives separately from them. There are many options that way.

 

[Calson]

I used a RAID NAS that is connected to my wifi router so it can be accessed by any computer in the house. I use the NAS drives which are slower speed but generate a lot less heat and less noise. With RAID the drive speed is not the gating factor but rather how the RAID is implemented (hardware of software) and the CPU's power and amount of Ram for cache.

I have a NAS with 4 drive bays and one with 5 drive bays. At a minimum I would want a NAS with 2 drive bays set up as RAID1. The NAS boxes provide an Ethernet connection so a simple matter to connect them to a switch or a Wifi router. My 5-bay NAS has 1GB and 10GB Ethernet ports and I use the slower one for the Wifi connection and the 10GB one to do a direct connect to my workstation.

 

[Anjin San]

Thanks all…I will stick with my current slower and smaller 2.5 inch drives for now…but I’m contemplating switching the computer desk and wife choral music practice stations in the office to put the former near the closet because getting an Ethernet cable there is possible as opposed to where it is now…if I do that sticking a large drive in the closet if needed is easy.