Thermal and Acoustics

Heat and sound are also two very important factors in drive performance especially when considering where they will be used. A loud hard drive which becomes warm very quickly may not be the best choice for home theater PCs or any PC without adequate cooling and the noise alone could be a bit annoying. Take a look at how each drive performed as far as heat and noise output goes.

Thermal

Temperature readings are taken directly off of the hard disk drives topside above the platters.

The overall idle temperatures of each drive are not extremely high lingering at about 41-42 degrees celsius. But...

...when comparing them to each drive's operating temperatures, they come close to being the warmest running drives on the list at 47-48 degrees, at the same heat level as the 10,000RPM Raptor and 16MB DiamondMax 10..

Acoustics

To measure the sound output of each drive we have taken decibel readings of each drive at their startup phase as well as the sound output while there is disk activity.

Sound output is never an issue if a high quality sealed case is used to house the PC's components but it can get annoying with a few hard disks churning away. Each of the SATA300 drives produced a reasonable amount of noise, not really as quiet as the SATA150 SpinPoint series, but nowhere as loud as Maxtor's DiamondMax 10.

Real World Tests - Multitasking Performance Final Words
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  • bersl2 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    And I need to learn to refresh.
  • bersl2 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    ---quote---
    Our first benchmark shows Western Digital's WD1600JS coming in at second best in pure hard disk performance at 719 IO operations per second while the 74GB 15000RPM Raptor still tops the charts.
    ---quote---

    Um... did I miss something? Aren't Raptors 10k in RPMs?
  • mechBgon - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Typo on page 3 referring to a 15000rpm Ratpro. They wish :D

    ...errr, 10th post!
  • cryptonomicon - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    eh, a few minutes ago, the review showed up but when i clicky, it goes to search review panel.
  • GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    No graphs on some pages still.
  • GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Haha!
  • PuravSanghani - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    When our publisher is away, with HTML we get to play!

    Sorry about that guys...everything should be good now. Do let us know if you see anything odd though.

    Thanks for stopping by!

    Purav
  • pastorjay - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    If I remember right, Wes said that their HTML coder was gone and they were doing all their own coding.
  • Krk3561 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    graphs wont work for me either
  • ChiefNutz - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Never mind.

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