Digital Home Thoughts: The Best 'Upgrade Saturday' I've Ever Had

Every couple of months, I have what I like to call an "Upgrade Saturday". This is a Saturday when I spend a good portion of my day upgrading either the hardware or software on one or more of my computers - and sometimes it's both. I'm always pursuing higher levels of performance or seeking to improve my systems in some way, and last weekend I pursued a new goal: to make one of my computers quieter. I have a computer that I leave on 24/7 in order to record TV shows (it's the one in the corner on the right-hand side in this photo) and two things about it have bugged me: the noise from the hard drives, and the noise from the fans. I did a bit of investigating regarding the fans, and after pressing a finger here and there, virtually all of the fan noise was coming from two 80mm fans at the back of the case. I have a passively-cooled NVIDIA 7950GT video card, so getting hot air out of the case is important - but what was doing that job was simply too loud. I'd read good things about Scythe fans over at SPCR, and at only $9.99 each it was easy to pick up two of the ultra low-flow fans.

The other thing I was unhappy with were the two Seagate hard drives I had in there - both were Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives; one was 400 GB and the other was 500 GB. I could hear them grinding away quite often, so the case was picking up the vibration and amplifying it. Unfortunately the case uses a hard drive cage with vertical mounts, so a suspension system wasn't possible. I also liked the idea of one bigger, faster, quieter drive to replace both of them.

I'd read some good things about the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives, namely that they were monsters in the performance department but also still very quiet, so I thought I'd pick one up. My local computer store, Memory Express, had them on for $99, so it was hard to say no to. If you went back ten years in time and said that you'd be able to buy 1000 GB worth of storage for $99, no one would have believed you. It's amazing how vast the storage on modern hard drives have become.

So how did my upgrades go? Getting the hard drive installed was easy, but the fans were anything but. The case I have uses rubber grommets in between the fan and the case. These prooved to be frustrating to work with, so the fans took me a good hour to get installed - this is workng at a casual pace while watching a DVD on another computer. I took the opportunity to correct an error in the wiring job that left the front USB ports on this computer non-functional, and I also decided to simplify my power supply wiring.

When I was finished and I booted up the computer - still with the cover off mind you - I was blown away at how quiet it was. I couldn't hear any sound coming from any of the fans, nor the hard drive as it booted Windows. This is exactly what I was hoping for! Here are my before and after Windows Experience Index scores:

Figure 1: Before the hard drive upgrade.

Figure 2: After the hard drive upgrade.

As you can see, the primary hard disk score went from 5.6 to 5.9 - not a small improvement. I'm unsure why the memory score went from 5.6 to 5.7, but I"ll take it. Prior to swapping out the hard drives, I used a command line-based tool called H2BENCHW. This tool does some pretty hardcore benchmarking of the hard drive. Here's that the scores for the Seagate 7200.10 400 GB drive were:

• Sequential Read: 62.5 MB/s
• Sequential Transfer: 69.4 MB/s
• Repetative sequential read: 117.5 MB/s
• Sustained Data Rate Read: 59.5 MB/s

Not too bad, right? The scores on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drive were as follows:

• Sequential Read: 122.3 MB/s (95% faster)
• Sequential Transfer: 173.5 MB/s (250% faster)
• Repetative sequential read: 204.5 MB/s (74% faster)
• Sustained Data Rate Read: 134.3 MB/s MAX (225% faster)

The difference in those scores absolutely floored me - and these aren't just theoretical numbers either. I noticed a decrease in boot time, much faster file move/copy performance, and a generally snappier experience. Oh, and the drive is whisper-quiet as well. Those numbers on the 7200.12? They're higher than on my 150 GB Western Digital Raptor drive!

I couldn't have asked for a better upgrade - everything went quiet well, and my computer is now much quieter than before, but also performs faster. Have you have an "upgrade Saturday" recently? How did it go?

And as a footnote, if you're interested in doing your own benchmarks with H2BENCHW, here's what you do: place the single EXE file in your root C: drive. Hit your start menu, type RUN to get the command prompt showing, but right-click on it and run it as an Administrator. Get to the root of your C: drive, then type h2benchw -english -a 1, where "1" is the drive you want to benchmark.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He loves a fast hard drive!

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