SATA advice please!

[GNEP]

I'm in the market for a new hard drive because the Maxtor Diamondmax +9 in my main machine now is the noisiest thing in there by a LONG way - so that will go to my brother as a christmas present, and I will probably go for a Samsung Spinpoint which apparently is one of the quietest drives around at the moment.

Anyway, this brings me around to the point of the post. This is likely to be the last upgrade to this machine for a good few months, and the next one will likely be major with the mobo and CPU changing. This new mobo combo when it happens would be nice if it was SATA-native. So I was thinking - should I buy a SATA HDD now as well? How does one go about connecting up a SATA drive to a mobo with the old IDE connectors? Via a PCI controller board? Could I boot off that? I have v. little experience with anything more exotic than putting 2 HDDs on a single IDE channel! Are these controller boards cheap? I'd only need it for 6 months or so... I don't need it for the performance right now - just for future proofing's sake.

Or should I just go for a nice'n'quiet good old PATA drive and get a SATA one when I do the major upgrade next year? Because if I understand things right, SATA-controller-to-PATA-drive conversion is easy via a little board/connector you can add to the drive (?).

Any vaguely relevant info would be much appreciated!

TIA

Gnep

[TransformX]

It might be cheaper to buy a new motherboard than to buy a SATA controller.

[Admiral]

As TX said, it's probably cheaper to buy a new motherboard than the PCI controller. The Asrock K7S8XE + (SIS 748/964) should be a nice native SATA choice for AMD K7, while for Intel you need a i865 or i875 motherboard to have native SATA support.
If you want a quiet SATA drive it's Seagate for you.
As for connecting SATA drives to PATA controllers, I don't think you can, there are adapters that do the opposite though.

[spadnos]

For the most part, you're better off buying a little more than you need now, and waiting to get anything better.

The price of SATA drives will most likely come down in 6 months. Any (resonably good) motherboard will have the controller built in by then. The combined savings of not buying the controller now and paying less for the drive later will probably amount to the cost of a new drive in 6 months.

- Steve

[GNEP]

Thanks guys... looks like you confirmed my suspicions and I will just go for a 120GB or so PATA drive.

So now... is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 series or the Samsung Spinpoint P80 series quieter? The forums at silentpcreview seem to point (just) to the Spinpoints (I can't seem to find many Barracuda V's around - they appear to be being phased out). Given a choice between less "whine" (spinning noise) and less seek noise I would go for the less whine btw.

[az]

My Hitachi DeskStar 180GXP is very quiet, almost no whine (my left side panel is off!), and little seek noise in quiet mode. There's just an occasional sound like tea in a thermos flask getting cold - I thought the drive was damaged when I first heard it, but now I hear it maybe once a day (though it happens more frequently than that), and I'm very noise sensitive. The sound is some kind of error protection mechanism, AFAIK, to prevent another deskstar disaster. The drive is also very fast, and can be had with 8mb cache.

AZ

[Rigel]

Go to:

http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

and sort by idle noise.

[GNEP]

Interesting stuff.

Rigel - according to that list my Diamondmax +9 is quieter than a Barracuda IV - although I am willing to bet money that I have a particularly noisy example as my housemate has the exact same model and it doesn't make as loud a whine (although it's difficult to tell as his whole system is a lot noisier than mine)

[GNEP]

Hmm I think this thread helps :

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=7870

[The PIT]

Originally posted by az
My Hitachi DeskStar 180GXP is very quiet, almost no whine (my left side panel is off!), and little seek noise in quiet mode. There's just an occasional sound like tea in a thermos flask getting cold - I thought the drive was damaged when I first heard it, but now I hear it maybe once a day (though it happens more frequently than that), and I'm very noise sensitive. The sound is some kind of error protection mechanism, AFAIK, to prevent another deskstar disaster. The drive is also very fast, and can be had with 8mb cache.

AZ

Mmmm that sounds like the old death rattle.

[Ssin]

Personaly I'd avoid anything related to Maxtor. They have (IMO) the highest return rate for HDD's.
The quietest HDD's for me have always been (and will hopefully stay like that) are Seagate and WDC.
Hitachi is still based on old IBM Pixie dust technology.
So stick to my advices and keep on WDC and ST for quietness.
If it's premium service you want then the only choice is WDC.

[Indiana]

I have the 160GB Samsung SATA and it the quietest HD I've (not) heard up to now. It just seems to not make any sound at all...
Can't directly compare to the new Seagates, though. But my previous Seagate, IBM GXP and WD drives all are/were by far more noisy.

[GNEP]

Ssin - I've had plenty of Maxtors, with no problems with any of them to date. Just the noise now the rest of the computer is quiet

Indiana - thanks that's exactly the sort of confirmation of their noise levels I was looking for

[DentyCracker]

Have you run the acoustics thingy that maxtor has? (Amset I think) Noise is relative but my drive seems pretty quiet, and I have it set to noisy (acoustic management off)

[GNEP]

Denty - yup - but that fiddles with seek noise which is not what bothers me. It is the whining of the platters spinning that bothers me.