On Wed, 22 May 2013, Allan Duncan <amd2345@fastmail.com.au> wrote:
acquaintance of mine chanced upon some Seagate bods while waiting at the Hong Kong airport and queried them on this exact point. Their explanation was that they did vibration and bearing noise tests, and the units that topped the class became SCSI (or "enterprise" these days) and the rest we poor sods got. There is good engineering justification for this sorting strategy.
The difference in noise between rack mount server systems and desktop systems is significant. It's no big deal to spend all day in a room with a dozen desktop PCs but being in a room with a single 1RU server for a few minutes is really unpleasant. The noise you hear is relative to the vibration that the inside of the server experiences. So drives that don't cope well with vibration will fail in servers even though they could work perfectly in a desktop PC. I'm aware of one instance where some disks worked in one server but not in another server of the same make and model due to slight differences in vibration from the cooling fans. So it's a good idea to pay extra for disks that can handle vibration that are to run in a vibrating server. But there's no point paying extra for that if the disks in question are going to run in a nice quiet desktop system. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/