But luckily not for Pulsar or audio
For my favourite little piece of kit I have two Seagate Barracudas (20 & 80)coming my way in a few days - thanks to the advice here...
80 Gb 7200 rpm HD: IBM, Maxtor or Seagate?
I have a fair number of hard disks amounting to approx 600gig of space.
My Maxtor drives have been superb. I have 160,80,20,10 gig maxtor drives. They have been reliable, they perform well and they arnt too noisy. I use 20 successfully in a silentdrive enclosure as my main workstation ystem disk. Its near silent and perfectly quick enough. The others all sit in my server.
I also have 2 x 75 gig IBM gxp75 disks. These are the ones to avoid! IBM in the past have made fast and reliable disks but these have the famous glass platters. They are running ok now but about 6 months ago 1 disk failed making the dreading scratching noise they are famous for. I had to low level format them. I now just run them as a linear raid backup.
I have 2 18gig ibm ultrastar scsi disks that are really quick but also noisy and get hot. So I've disconnected them for now. Noise annoys
My new audio pc comes with seagate barracuda IV drives which seem to be extremely quiet and I believe they offer comparable performance to the maxtor drives. I dont know much about reliability but my philosophy is to double everything up or have some decent backup strategy. Losing data is so unpleasant.
Finally for IDE performance.. Western Digital seem to be the kings at the moment. Their latest 7200rpm drives come with 8mb of cache. They are certainly not the quietest drives but they probably run cool enough to slide into a silent drive enclosure.
For music DAW purposes I think the seagates are your best bet.
a fantastic site for storage is http://www.storagereview.com. They review in great depth all the latest drives and cdrom products.
For those who are interested in quietening their pcs I would recommend the following...
Q power supplies from http://www.quietpc.com - Very quiet, I gather these are better than the enermax whisper series.
silentdrive enclosures - very effective at cutting out harddisk noise. also from http://www.quietpc.com. (although i gather that the seagate drives are so quiet you may not need these)
Alpha heatsink and pabst fans - pricey but worth it. the slowest pabst fans run at a staggering 12db and still shift 19cpm of air!! the alpha heatsinks help distribute the heat quickly. you can get these at http://www.overclockers.co.uk and most good online overclocking/cpu type stores.
I have a pc using all of the above and It runs much quieter than my new carillon music pc which is designed to run quiet - they claimed around 24db. Im about to replace the heatsink/fan in that with alpha/pabst combination.
Other items of interest..
Northboard heatsink - some motherboards have fans to cool this chipset cos they are cheap. You can replace them with a good heatsink - checkout one on http://www.quietpc.com.
When choosing a graphics card you may want to make sure you find one without a fan on it. Matrox cards dont have fans, neither do some of the slower geforce cards and ATI cards. But the latest greatest games cards are normally equipped with very noisy fans.
If you can afford to, get a heavy case - I just invested in a carillon pc from http://www.carillondirect.com because i wanted their case! its nice and heavy, rackmountable and has some cool features for audio like neutrik 1/4inch jack at front and bays for midi transport controllers. (ill give a more detailed review of this soon along with the rest of my studio once i get it all up and running.)
Coolermaster also make some very nice aluminium cases that act like one big heatsink, helping to keep everything nice and cool. these are also expensive but they look gorgeous.
Last tip, tighten everything up well and rest something heavy on top of your pc It helps reduce any vibrations.
My Maxtor drives have been superb. I have 160,80,20,10 gig maxtor drives. They have been reliable, they perform well and they arnt too noisy. I use 20 successfully in a silentdrive enclosure as my main workstation ystem disk. Its near silent and perfectly quick enough. The others all sit in my server.
I also have 2 x 75 gig IBM gxp75 disks. These are the ones to avoid! IBM in the past have made fast and reliable disks but these have the famous glass platters. They are running ok now but about 6 months ago 1 disk failed making the dreading scratching noise they are famous for. I had to low level format them. I now just run them as a linear raid backup.
I have 2 18gig ibm ultrastar scsi disks that are really quick but also noisy and get hot. So I've disconnected them for now. Noise annoys
My new audio pc comes with seagate barracuda IV drives which seem to be extremely quiet and I believe they offer comparable performance to the maxtor drives. I dont know much about reliability but my philosophy is to double everything up or have some decent backup strategy. Losing data is so unpleasant.
Finally for IDE performance.. Western Digital seem to be the kings at the moment. Their latest 7200rpm drives come with 8mb of cache. They are certainly not the quietest drives but they probably run cool enough to slide into a silent drive enclosure.
For music DAW purposes I think the seagates are your best bet.
a fantastic site for storage is http://www.storagereview.com. They review in great depth all the latest drives and cdrom products.
For those who are interested in quietening their pcs I would recommend the following...
Q power supplies from http://www.quietpc.com - Very quiet, I gather these are better than the enermax whisper series.
silentdrive enclosures - very effective at cutting out harddisk noise. also from http://www.quietpc.com. (although i gather that the seagate drives are so quiet you may not need these)
Alpha heatsink and pabst fans - pricey but worth it. the slowest pabst fans run at a staggering 12db and still shift 19cpm of air!! the alpha heatsinks help distribute the heat quickly. you can get these at http://www.overclockers.co.uk and most good online overclocking/cpu type stores.
I have a pc using all of the above and It runs much quieter than my new carillon music pc which is designed to run quiet - they claimed around 24db. Im about to replace the heatsink/fan in that with alpha/pabst combination.
Other items of interest..
Northboard heatsink - some motherboards have fans to cool this chipset cos they are cheap. You can replace them with a good heatsink - checkout one on http://www.quietpc.com.
When choosing a graphics card you may want to make sure you find one without a fan on it. Matrox cards dont have fans, neither do some of the slower geforce cards and ATI cards. But the latest greatest games cards are normally equipped with very noisy fans.
If you can afford to, get a heavy case - I just invested in a carillon pc from http://www.carillondirect.com because i wanted their case! its nice and heavy, rackmountable and has some cool features for audio like neutrik 1/4inch jack at front and bays for midi transport controllers. (ill give a more detailed review of this soon along with the rest of my studio once i get it all up and running.)
Coolermaster also make some very nice aluminium cases that act like one big heatsink, helping to keep everything nice and cool. these are also expensive but they look gorgeous.
Last tip, tighten everything up well and rest something heavy on top of your pc
It helps reduce any vibrations.