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Anyone ever compared the noise levels, or the nature of the noise, of different 2.5" HDDs?

I was preemptively avoiding 7200rpm drives because of noise, but it hadn't occurred to me until now that I should pay attention also to the differences between 5400rpmers.

I replaced a Samsung/Seagate Spinpoint M8 500GB with a Toshiba L200 1TB, and the idle noise is more prominent. The root cause may be that the Toshiba is 2 platters rather than 1. I can't find exact specs for the old drive, but extrapolating from various specs it should be 2-4dB quieter. But I don't know, maybe the problem is the noise spectrum.

Any thoughts?

HGST Travelstar 1TB 7200rpm = 100% inaudible to me. It's in a NUC that boots from m.2 SSD and sends USB audio to a Schiit Modi2 DAC and then to a Pioneer SX-5580 blackface West German version.

I've never noticed noise from the lower RPM models. 7200 you can occasionally hear when they seek, since the head actuators tend to be tuned for performance rather than low power/noise (the assumption is probably that if you paid for 7200 RPM, you care more about performance).

I'm using the drive in a laptop, and it doesn't provide much soundproofing.
In a heavily built case it wouldn't be audible.

You can always run the higher RPM drives in "quiet mode" via the ATA acoustic settings. I recall it making a huge difference on loud drives at the expense of a little bit of latency on seeks.

Seeking noise is less important. I don't suppose it causes them to run at lower RPM?

Can you trust it to be available and effective on any drive model from any manufacturer?

meerkt wrote:

Seeking noise is less important. I don't suppose it causes them to run at lower RPM?

No, it just changes how hard they accelerate/decelerate the heads during seeks. So I take it the noise you're getting is mainly whine/vibration? That may be a manufacturing defect (e.g. slightly off-balance platters).

meerkt wrote:

Can you trust it to be available and effective on any drive model from any manufacturer?

I believe it is optional (and ignored on drives that don't support it).

Yeah, the idle noise is the issue. I don't think it's defective in this regard (despite the clicks situation).

BTW, the drive doesn't support AAM.

meerkt wrote:

Yeah, the idle noise is the issue. I don't think it's defective in this regard (despite the clicks situation).

If the drive is vibrating excessively, that could indirectly be causing the clicks, by causing seek errors.