Has anyone personally compared WD Reds against HGST Deskstar for noise?

[Beer]

I put 6x 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS drives in my build, and I knew there would be some audible tone.. but it's worse than I expected, and really quite unbearable for a home server out in the open. I don't have anywhere in the house with good ventilation to move the server to, so it's becoming a pretty big issue for me.

I'm unfortunately barely past my return period on the drives, and might end up selling them and rethinking my storage configuration. I've heard in various places that WD Reds are quiet.. but people don't usually mention if they're talking about 1 or 10 of them.. and you can never know what their frame of reference is.

I know 5400 RPM drives should theoretically be quieter than 7200 RPM.. but by how much, and what other acoustic characteristic differences between the drives might be impacting sound.

Has anyone ever personally compared the two?

I'm currently using 6x in RAIDZ2, and I am considering the possibility of instead doing 4x 8TB Reds in a raid10 config.. but that will be more expensive and if the noise benefit isn't significant.. that's going to be a major problem.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

I don't know anything specific about their relative sound levels. I haven't heard a difference in drive noise levels in several years. That could say more about my hearing than their audio characteristics.

I don't think four 8TB reds are going to be measurably quieter than six 4TB Deskstars.

Are you sure the sound is coming from the drives? Six 7200 RPM drives may be producing more heat than what you had before and your fans are pushing harder to keep them cool. Or maybe your power supply is working harder/hotter/louder with the additional drives?

In any case, it's less expensive to replace your case than your drives. You can buy a pimped-out, sound-dampened case with high-volume, low-RPM fans for less than half the cost of a single 8TB WD Red drive

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Bidule0hm]

I sleep 2 meters away from my server and the loudest thing in it is the fans (granted I have a pretty heavy sound dampening design for the drives) and I can barely hear the server during the day when the noise floor is higher so I can say the WD Red are very quiet (as the Seagate NAS drives BTW, just a little bit louder than the Reds though).

 

[ccssid]

I have 10 wd red (3tb) in a pretty basic case. what I basically hear are the (4) 120 mm fans.

At 6" I get about 55 db and 12" about 50 db. And it drops pretty quickly from there. My meter does not do a good job below 50 db in measuring, sorry.

I sit about 6 ft. from the unit and just a slight hum of the fans. I am using a cheapo radio shack sound meter. Hope this helps. To me, it is just some calming "white" noise.

I do not know about HGST hdd.

 

[Beer]

Ok, so new developments.

I was 100% sure it was my drives making the noise, not my fans. At idle my fans are running 300-400 RPM and they are dead quiet (spent $100 on 5 ultra quiet 120/140mm Noctuas all around for the build). But still, I wanted to triple check before I replied. Yes, it's my hard drives, for absolute certain.

But.. while I was poking around with the system, I noticed that the top of my case is 100% open. I'm using a Fractal Design Node 804 .. the entire top section is a giant open filter. All of the drive noise was escaping out of the top, there was no volume difference with or without the top on. I had no idea.. I thought the metal mesh on top was just decoration.

So.. for the time being, I pulled the grille off of the top section, and cut a piece of cardboard to fit, to help block some of the sound.. it took the noise level down about 30%.. which is more bearable for now. Airflow is still fine and temps haven't changed.. so cooling is good with the cardboard.

I guess I'll need to ditch this case and go for something else. Thanks for the PM @cssearcy .. I actually use an R5 for my main desktop. I was thinking "eureka! i can just swap cases!" .. that didn't even cross my mind. But then I remembered my main PC has a full ATX board so that won't work. At least now I know what's going on

Thanks everyone