Dying HDD. Replacement suggestions...Raptor?

[SuperPickle]

I have a SCSI drive subsystem including a 15K OS drive backed up by 10K drives (all first gen, I believe and out of warrentee). The 15K drive has been acting funny lately including making a high-pitch whine ~5min after startup. This whine sounds electrically produced, not mechanical and in the 10-15KHz range but it goes away. That's just an annoyance, but occasionally my whole machine will start to vibrate and make lots of noise. If I give it a good whack, it stops (reminiscent of smackin the TV to make it work).

So, it looks like a replacement is in order and soon. I see a few courses of action:
1) Buy a Raptor and ditch the SCSI (filling in storage requirements as needed)
2) Buy another 15K drive to maintain my familiar performance
3) Buy a Barracuda and make the box very quiet, sacrificing performance for less noise

I don't particularly like noise, but I put up with the HDD noise as a neccessary performance evil. The rest of the box is pretty darn quiet. Will going back to 7200 or 10K rpm make me pissed?

What should I do assuming <$200 budget?

 

[SuperPickle]

Just looking for oppinions.
^^^

 

[JBT]

You could go for a 74Gig Raptor it is a little above $200 I got mine for $214 they are really quite fast. If you check out storagereview.com you will see that they can compete quite well vs the 3rd gen 15K SCSI drives in single user environments even beat them some of the time, and may do quite a bit better in multi user once SATA controlers support TCQ. My drive is pretty quite too, no annoying noises at idle I'd say silent actually but yes you can hear it on read and writes which I actually do like. The drive is pretty cool running compared to my older Maxtor drive. It runs about 25 C and is cool to the touch.

I think you would like this drive I do.

 

[thorin]

Raptor kicks the butts of all drives listed at StorageReview.com with the exception of the top 2 Ultra320 SCSI drives, it even kicks the Seagate Cheetah 15.3 Ultra320 series.

Here's their full review of the Raptors.

Thorin

 

[MDE]

I'd go Raptor as well. I'm waiting for a hot Sonata deal so I can make room to put another one in for a RAID-0 and a well overdue complete format\reinstall.

 

[Overkast]

Ditto on the Raptor 72. I have two 36's are they're f**king awesome... and the 72's are even better from what I hear.

 

[SuperPickle]

Looks like the Raptor is the way to go then, although the 74G is a little more than I wanted to spend. Meh, I'll just have to sell off some of my junk. FS/ST I go.
Thanks for the encouragement to spend more than I should .

 

[Overkast]

Originally posted by: basilisk420
Thanks for the encouragement to spend more than I should .

Our pleasure!!!

 

[addragyn]

Go to HyperMicro if you want to stick w/ SCSI or grab a Raptor if you want to try something new and have the PATA controller.

 

[Markfw]

When you kick and the sound goes away, that sure doesn;t sound like a SCSI drive to me. I would try to isolate where the noise is other than the high pitched whine. SCSI drives have a very high MTBF, and that would be the last thing I suggest. Also, if you are used to a 15k SCSI drive, even the raptor will seem slow. (IMO) Stay with SCSI, but make sure that the problem first. You can get a long SCSI cable (unlike IDE or SATA) and plug the drive power into an old AT PSU, and then you will know for sure where the moise is coming from. Mine are 6 feet away in an old 486 CASE.

 

[SuperPickle]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
When you kick and the sound goes away, that sure doesn;t sound like a SCSI drive to me. I would try to isolate where the noise is other than the high pitched whine. SCSI drives have a very high MTBF, and that would be the last thing I suggest. Also, if you are used to a 15k SCSI drive, even the raptor will seem slow. (IMO) Stay with SCSI, but make sure that the problem first. You can get a long SCSI cable (unlike IDE or SATA) and plug the drive power into an old AT PSU, and then you will know for sure where the moise is coming from. Mine are 6 feet away in an old 486 CASE.

You make good points and this is something about which I am concerned. I know the Raptor is speedy crazy-fast, but it's still only 10K rpm. The transfer rates are much faster than my current drive, I'm sure, but the seek times on a 15K drive are terrific. I don't want to drop a pile of cash on a premium HDD and be disappointed.

Has anyone had first-hand experience with 15K drives and Raptors to give a 'feel' comparison?

As far as isolating the source of vibration, I had the same gut feeling as you did. I thought it must be a fan or something similar. All of my fans are on controllers so when the vibration started, I killed all the fans. Sound stayed. My HDDs are in a removable cage to I did just that - removed it and then unplugged all but the 15K drive. I'm 99% sure it's that drive that's making the vibration but it doesn't do it all the time which is the strangest part.

Killer idea on making the HDD remote. I really have to look into that - stash 'em under the bed or something similar.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

try getting some rubber washers and putting them between the hard drives and their mounts. its a common practice.

 

[Jalapeno]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
When you kick and the sound goes away, that sure doesn;t sound like a SCSI drive to me. I would try to isolate where the noise is other than the high pitched whine. SCSI drives have a very high MTBF, and that would be the last thing I suggest. Also, if you are used to a 15k SCSI drive, even the raptor will seem slow. (IMO) Stay with SCSI, but make sure that the problem first. You can get a long SCSI cable (unlike IDE or SATA) and plug the drive power into an old AT PSU, and then you will know for sure where the moise is coming from. Mine are 6 feet away in an old 486 CASE.

Also, since SCSI devices have such a high MTBF they have at least 5 years of warranty - are you sure it's expired? Other than that, go for the Raptors. Best investment I ever made in my machine.

 

[ZombieJesus]

Consider a pair of 80 gig Seagate 7200.7 drives and put them in RAID-0. Cheap silent and good performance.

 

[SuperPickle]

Originally posted by: AWhackWhiteBoy
try getting some rubber washers and putting them between the hard drives and their mounts. its a common practice.

I have the SLK3700AMB case so the vibrations even defeat the rubber mounts.

As for warrentee, the 15K drive case is a Seagate, but badged as a Compaq drive. I was under the impression that I was SOL trying to get a warrentee from Compaq. If someone knows otherwise, please LMK.
(the 10K drive is still under warrentee, but it's doin' just fine)

OH yes, and I've experienced the data-loss horrors of RAID 0 and won't go back. The performance boost (which is real-world negligable IMHO) is not worth the risk of failure.