Western Digital WD1500ADFD: King Raptor

Hard Drive Performance: Thermal and Acoustics

We have revised our acoustics testing for this article. Our acoustic test utilizes our standard test bed components, but we installed our Thermaltake water-cooling system for the CPU and turned off the case fans to isolate as much case noise as possible during testing. Our OCZ power supply is virtually silent in these tests and we installed our fanless Gigabyte 6600GT video card to further reduce noise.

Our acoustic tests are designed to measure the decibel levels while the system is at idle and also under load while running the General Hard Disk Drive Usage benchmark within PCMark 2005. We found through trial and error that this particular benchmark produces controlled readings across a wide range of applications within the benchmark. This particular benchmark utilizes 60% reads and 40% writes within the trace playback file.

The measurements are taken at a distance of 5 millimeters from the rear and front of the drive being tested in order to minimize surrounding environmental noise. The reported measurements are based on an A-weighted decibel score that measures frequencies similar to the way that the human ear responds to sound. We take a total of 5 measurements for each test. We subtract the high and low scores and then average the middle three to arrive at our findings.

Our thermal tests continue to utilize sensor readings via the S.M.A.R.T. technology on the drives. We will move to an infrared thermometer testing procedure in the near future to supplement the current test procedures.

Our favorite drive for HTPC work, the Samsung SP2504C, leads the group in both thermals and acoustics. The drive was virtually silent throughout our testing and would make an excellent drive for silent systems.

The thermal characteristics of both Raptors were very close with the WD1500 running slightly hotter under the load conditions. While we did not report the infrared test results in this article, the heat sink fan area on the Raptors reached temperatures around 55c during the load testing. Of course, these temperatures would be reduced with the case fans running, but it is something to be aware of if you plan on utilizing the drive in a SFF case.

The acoustical characteristics of both Raptors were similar. You will notice a slight whine during the spin-up phase on each drive along with the same whine when the drive powers down. The reads are clearly audible, but do not have the same metallic noise that we noticed on the Maxtor drives. During normal operations, both drives could be heard, but the sounds emitting from the drive was almost dull compared to the Maxtor drives. The WD1500 was slightly louder during constant read access compared to the WD740GD. While not obtrusive in our opinion, the sound levels would be clearly evident in a silent system.