SATA II to the Power of 3.0Gb/sec: Three Drives Reviewed

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.