The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Harmacist88 on 2025-01-28 13:48:39.
I've been using a 6TB WD Black 7200 RPM HDD for the past 5 years. I mainly use it for long term media storage (file downloads, documents, music, movies, photos, gameplay recordings, etc.) as well as temp storage for games I'm not actively playing. I recently put together a new rig and threw the old drive in there and the thunking noise of the head parking every few seconds is driving me crazy. I don't think anything is wrong with it; I ran the WD SMART diagnostic thing with no issues and this drive has always been known to be noisy. Maybe it's because I finally have the PC at ear level again, maybe it's because this new chassis doesn't dampen noise as well as my old one, maybe it's because the rest of my components are now pretty much silent, maybe I just tolerate it less as I've grown older, I don't know, but I can hear the thing from across the living room and it's very grating.
I'd like to replace it with something comparable that isn't quite as noisy. I understand that it is a performance drive so a quieter replacement may be less performant, but I'm willing to make that tradeoff. Prior to this drive, I used a 2TB 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda and I found the noise profile on that one to be tolerable; is there something similar in the 6-8 TB capacity range? I'm not too familiar with NAS drives or whether they fit my use case. Also not really sure whether I truly benefit from a performance drive--it might be a holdover from older builds where it was more common to actually run games off the HDD.
I've looked into SATA SSDs like the 8TB Samsung QVO but they're still really expensive, and--maybe an outdated view--I still worry about their longevity vs. HDDs.
Any recommendations?