slaingod

So I needed a new hard drive for my mp3’s and went to my fav site newegg.com, since they deliver next day in NYC from Edison NJ for most items for free or with just standard shipping. I found a new class of hard drives (if you consider one to be a class), that I decided to give a whirl, the new Western Digital Caviar GP WD5000AACS 500GB 5400 to 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. In general, I am not looking for the highest performance from an mp3 hard drive, and most of my hard drives in general really.  What I focus on is cool and quiet operation, and reliability.  Man, is this thing cool and quiet!  It uses a lot less power since it can spin down to 5400 rpm, and essentially feels room temperature when running at 5MB/s when transferring my collection over the network.  It can ramp up to 7200 rpm if it gets under serious load, but I doubt I will stress it too much with my usage patterns.  I’ve had problems with drive heat in some of my recent drives, a just had to RMA my Maxtor MaxLine 500GB drive that started developing the ‘click of death’.  This drive only comes with a 3 year warranty, though that is much better than the standard 1 year warranty of a couple of years ago from most consumer grade devices.  That was why I originally switched to MaxLine, as they had 3 year warranties back when everyone else had 1 year, and now they have 5 year warranties.  But this thing is so much cooler and quieter (less vibration), that my gut instinct says it should fare very well. The only other thing I’m not sure of is if this drive is suited to be used in a hardware RAID setup.  Seems more and more drives come in ‘RAID’ editions these days, or you may need to upgrade the firmware, etc.

Drive noise, and drive cooling fan noise is a major contributor to overall system noise in many cool and quiet designs.  Cool and quiet is important for me, as my main system is in my bedroom.  This thing is sitting right next to me in a usb enclosure and I can’t hear a thing. I’ve never really used Western Digital drives, though for speed I know the Raptor is the best out there.  They certainly got it right with this drive.  And the price is the same as regular 500GB hard drives, so you don’t have to pay extra for the privilege.

UPDATE: It’s come to my attention that these drives are simply 5400RPM, not some hybrid speed changer.  That said, these are still green, quiet drives.  While you might not want to use them for a system disk, they are great for anything else that would actually need 500GB, like videos/mp3/downloads/etc.