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Hardware

Seagate Claims New Drive Silent and Fastest 213

Posted by Hemos from the I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it dept.
yknott writes "It seems that Seagate just released a virtually silent hard drive. It emits only 2.0 bels while spinning and 2.4 bels while seeking; the human ear can't hear sounds below 2.5 bels. No more grinding sounds! It features Fluid Dynamic Bearings, and has an internal transfer rate of 69.3 Megabytes per second. " I'm currently questing to build a quieter computer - and while I'd love to test this, I will definitely say that Silent Drives I recently bought from New England Digital is awesome - but is rated to only work with 5400 rpms drives.
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Seagate Claims New Drive Silent and Fastest More

Seagate Claims New Drive Silent and Fastest

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  • Shouldn't it the dept be (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'll-believe-it-when-i-hear-it?

  • Ponder (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe im dumb, but why dont companies work more on getting hard disks with no moving parts like alot of portable storage devices out now. Would this not increase speed also?

  • Silent? It's not that hard.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm currently questing to build a quieter computer


    Come on... it's not -that- hard to build a quiet computer. Right under my desk I've got a 600MHz running at 900, and it's virtually silent. I'm using the stock powersuply (from Inwin, it's a Powerman), a 7200RPM drive, a CD-ROM and my burner. Oh, yeah, and the two 120mm fans running on 7V (instead of the normal 12V. One's on intake in the front, one exhausting out a blowhole on top)).

    In my experience, the two biggest causes of noise in most computers are cheap heatsink fans and cheap (or excessively fast) CD drives. A good 7200RPM drive shouldn't be making that much noise (and if you want 10k, why not RAID?).

    Cheap cases are another thing to watch out for, since a cheap, flimsy case will, instead of dampening noise, act like a giant sounding board, converting all stray vibrations inside into noise.

  • A quiet drive alternative (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    After spending some dough on the SilentDrive enclosures, I suddenly realized that there is another alternative: Laptop drives! They are pretty quiet and can be converted to use a standard 40-pin connector. I'm not sure if you can get an 80-pin cable to work (UDMA 66/100), but it's worth a shot.

  • Do we really need this? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OK, so the grinding noise can be a bit much at times (especially if you're short on DIMMs and using a swap file a lot), but I kinda find it reassuring - I don't have to constantly check the little amber light on the front of my box to make sure something's going on, and if I'm in Windows (yes, I dual boot, because I like playing Oni) I can tell if it decides to do something sneaky behind my back (though since I've purged it of most of that stuff this isn't as much of an issue).

    Also, my case fans make way more noise than this : )

    Frankly, I'd rather spend my cash on more space or speed than I would on how loud it is. Hell, you can't even impress your friends with it (My drive's quieter than yours!).

    Club-Foot.co.uk [club-foot.co.uk] - even more pointless than /.

    Dr_Cheeks (can't post using my account [110261] after the mess with moderation on the OSDN-going-down story the other day - apparently I ended up modded down more than 5 times even though I got modded back up again - my karma is at 49 right now)

  • Silent cpu-cooler (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hello. I recently build myself a computer very near to 0 sound with an overclocked duron. I used a zalman 3100G heatsink(pure cooper gold coated) and a 12cm fan runing at 5V that blows fresh air over it since is mounted in the case door. I removed the PSU fan(since the big fan blows to outside trough the psu) and other ingenious and nice loking air exhaust with aluminium grilles. Big fans produce less noise due to less RPM, if you don't know. Even less if you run them at less voltage. The insides of the case are poliurethane coated, also the HD lies in a bed of the same material. Really not so complex job. The zalman heatsink cost about 60$, but the psu and other components are regular ones. see http://zalmantech.com/
  • Currently you can buy such devices. if your willing to pay 30 thousand for a 2 gig drive.

    What's the power consumption of PC100/133 SDRAM? Seems to me one could get a few DIMM slots and some control logic, and create a solid state drive for perhaps $100 more than the cost of the RAM. Only problem is it would need to be on all the time toi refresh (thus the power consumption relevance) or used for things like swap (which, if your main memory is RAMBUS or your system has a relatively low max RAM, isn't a bad idea.)
  • I'll kick you in the fargin' bels!
    -Roman Maroni


    --
  • Put that into a mac cube and you've got a completely silent, completely beautiful little device. remove the monitor & kb, pop on os x, and you've got a fileserver that can also be you're little apple alter :-)

    --


  • Now, as someone else commented about CDs and DVDs, YES, PLEASE, QUIET THESE HORRIBLE CONTRAPTIONS. My CD on my work computer has a cache that's just big enough to allow the drive to spin down for about 1/2 a second during a big transfer. Then it spins back up and transfers more. It's loud, it's annoying, and it turns this 40 some odd X CD Rom to about 10X.


    Thats where caddy based CDROMs come in handy. My Plextor 32 speed drive can barely be heard. A great drive (though it isn't entirely agreeing with my new Muse album:( My guess is that is the CD though)

  • Re:at every turn (Score:5)

    by Glytch ( 4881 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @03:20AM (#120609)
    LEDS softly blinking,
    Yet no hum of cooling fan.
    What evil magic this?
  • But what are the seek times?

    Transfer rates are not very indicative of
    useful performance.

    When I see 20,000RPM + FDB + SCSI, I'll
    be interested.

    -Kevin
  • And since hard drives actually aren't air tight, but have a little air filter, once the oil displaces the air inside the drive it will be very, very quiet. Forever.
  • The caddy probably has a lot less to do with it than the drive itself. Plextors are supposedly of higher quality than most, they're certainly priced as though they were.

    Unfortunately my budget only allows me to explore the quality level of whatever off-brand Staples or Circuit City is offering a rebate on, some of which are almost as quiet as your average helicopter.

    My experience with caddy-type audio CD drives (but not enough caddies for all the CDs) back when I worked in radio only re-inforced my opinion that whoever decided that CDs should be sold "bare" instead of in a rugged shuttered case like a 3.5 inch floppy should have their own special torment awaiting in the afterlife.

  • "The more I watch, the more I learn-
    If you set yourself on fire, the world will pay to watch you burn."

    Unfortunately the government of South Vietnam just laughed and made barbecue jokes.

    Yes, that was way off-topic. Excellent Clancy parody, btw.

  • You're both misinformed. A decibel is one-tenth of a Bel. One Bel is equal to ten decibels. Two and one-half Bels is equal to 10 decibels times 2 and one-half. 10 * 2.5 = 25. 2.5 Bels is 25 decibels.

    The prefix "deci" means "one-tenth". The prefix "deca" means "times ten". One hundred millimeters is ten centimeters is one decimeter is one-tenth of a meter is one-one-hundredth of a decameter. Yes, those are units of length, not sound pressure levels. It's an example.

  • the human ear can't hear sounds below 2.5 bels.

    Hmm. I thought the hearing limit was 0 bels (0 decibels).

    Of course working around loud fans for years will probably degrade your hearing to the mentioned level....

    Roger.
  • I hardly think this is the fastest drive alive. Seagate specifies the seek time at 8.9 ms. Their X15 drive, possibly the fastest drive on the market, is specified at 3.9 ms. The new drive has 40 GB per platter, but the X15 has 3.7 GB. Scaling for the X15's 2.6" platters and the Barracuda's slow spindle speed and lack of platters, the Barracuda might have a 14% advantage over the X15 in sequential transfer rate.

    When rotational latency is factored in, the Barracuda should have an access time of about 15.4 ms, while the X15 has a measured access time of 6.8 ms. Access time is the most important aspect of disk drive performance, and the X15 has a 225% advantage over the Barracuda in that category. Barracuda's 14% STR advantage can never make up for the disparity.

    Perhaps Seagate meant to claim the fastest drive ever to hold the name Barracuda ATA?

  • Point of fact factboy: Each "side" of a DVD is actually 9GB given that it's multilayer in about 99.99% of cases (which anyone who owns a DVD player knows as there's a microscopic delay during the layer change in movies).

    However, I will cede that indeed I miscalculated the data rate for DVDs and I do humbly prostrate myself for this error. Please forgive me.

  • Of course that particular factoid is bogus. i.e. They took the data rate of DVD (~8MB/second) and divided it into the throughput, and then state that that's how many simultaneous streams can be played. Of course anyone who's ever actually tried that knows that the constant seeking between the streams absolutely BRUTALIZES throughput, so unless you had 8 streams encoded intertwined there isn't a chance in hell.

  • The scale is logarithmic because, get this, the human ear has a logarithmic response.

    So while I'm sure there's some variation over the entire range, if you were to do a test, plotting the smallest noticible change in sound pressure on log graph paper, you'd wind up with a more or less straight line.

  • Perhaps they can't hear it through a computer case, though?
  • And of course your point is totally and completely bogus too since the data rate of DVD is a maximum of 10 Mega*Bits* per second and on average is somewhere between 3.5 and 5.5. That means for 8 streams, your drive needs to provide a MAXIMUM of 10MB/s and on average will need to provide about 4-5MB/s throughput while seeking between 8 files. This is a very impressive number even still for an IDE drive as anyone who has ever worked with nonlinear video systems knows as capture systems adhering to the CCIR-601 digital standard require 167Mb/s datarate. This would mean that the 4.7GB of a single sided DVD could hold about 4 minutes of video.

    Stop spewing and start using your brain.

    ~GoRK
  • Some people _are_ throwing money at solid state tech. And some people are throwing money at hard disks. The ones throwing money at hard disks are keeping waaaay ahead of the solid state people, indicated that perhaps solid state drives of massive size aren't that easy to produce...
    _____

  • bels? (Score:1)

    by ndege ( 12658 )
    I think they mean decibels. There is a diff you know. ARG...I know only enough physics to become annoyed by such statements.
    ---
  • Or rather, 'I'll-believe-it-when-I-don't-hear-it'.
  • I can not hear either recent 46gb or 80gb maxtor 5400rpm drives operating at all. why do i need quieter than that as long as there are other noiser components in the system (such as my pc power and cooling silencer power supply, the cpu fan, and the cd-rom drive's motor).

    now if only the noisy ibm hard drives in laptops would quiet down.

  • I thought it was weird that the article was specifying sound in bels, rather than decibels. Are you sure you're comparing the right units? Although I assume that 0db == 0 bels anyway.

    The stated hearing cutoff of 2.5 bels would be 25 decibels, which is definitely loud enough to hear.

  • A lot more than from you - let's see your web site that gets more hits and has more info than yours. Also, I'm pretty sure he's not 12 anymore.

  • I doubt the power use thing-- compare the battery life of a portable device using compactflash against the battery life of the same device with an IBM Microdrive.

    I begin to wonder if battery-backed-up RAM isn't a good idea. With SDRAM down to fifty bucks for a quarter-gig at Crucial (and I suspect you can find it cheaper), if you gotta have _really_ fast storage, a kilobuck gets you a five gig of solid state. Sure, that's a drop in the bucket compared to that 80GB IDE (or bigger!) but it's damned fast in the same comparison.

    On the other hand, it doesn't work well in the state most of my machines are in at the moment-- powered down in a storage facility...

    -JDF
  • It actually appears to be a pretty much verbatim copy of the Seagate press release [seagate.com] (Well, at least the online version)

  • Impressive... (Score:3)

    by rleyton ( 14248 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @02:42AM (#120630) Homepage
    The drive's record-breaking internal transfer rate -- 69.3 Mbytes per second -- is fast enough to copy an hour of MP3 music in under one second. Barracuda ATA IV is fast enough to stream eight movies simultaneously, in DVD quality, without dropping a frame

    Blimey. Genuinely impressive. Now I only need to buy myself eight televisions.

  • Re:Solid state (Score:4)

    by rleyton ( 14248 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @03:09AM (#120631) Homepage
    Have a read of The Innovators Dilemma - When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail [amazon.co.uk] - One of the main examples used throughout the book is how the hard disk industry is moving very rapidly, but that even innovative companies breaking new ground in the market, and keeping their customers sweet, still fail and die. I don't have my copy with me, but there was an interesting diagram in the first few chapters, showing how solid state disks are catching up, and will overtake hard disks, in the next few years.
  • My problem with SCSI is that there is no power management support for it in Linux, so your drive will spin constantly while the machine is on. Besides wasting electricity, this wears out your drive, and it starts to make more noise. My last SCSI brick started keening at a terrible pitch after about a year of constant operation. I won't buy SCSI again until the power management controls are up to IDE standards in the Linux kernel.

    God, I can't wait for mass storage to go solid state. :)

  • I need one of these in my iMac. Then my machine will be really quiet!

    I disagree with the "but I like to hear noise" comment. After years of server room work, the white noise of computer equipment/cooling fans drives me crazy. It numbs my thoughts. Anything that can drive us to completely quiet machines is JUST the thing!


    --
  • And it's fun, too. Makes people jump if I power on my PC with multiple Cheetahs while their around. PHBs get worried when the box powers down, due to the "down-shifting from fifth to first" whine it emits.

    --
  • They DO have a name in the ATA industry. It's "Mud."

    --
  • Your'e thingking of deca, which is 10x. Deci (as in deciliter), is 1/10th, so there are 10 decibels in one bel.

    --

  • Old job: dual fanned SGI O2 with three screaming external scsi disks on my desk -- I never really got to enjoy the great sound subsystem.

    New job: Powerbook G3 with external monitor (dual head! woohoo!), kbd, mouse -- the only sounds it makes are from the sound system (and occasional barely audible DVD-ROM seeks). There are fifteen of us, all with Powerbooks, in one large room with NO cube walls and the loudest sound is usually the clattering of keyboards and clicking of mice. It's truly amazing how big a difference it makes.

    Local disk storage was nice (fast!) but remote disk access is a price worth paying for quiet.
  • With the development that the rest of the computer industry undergoes (ref. Moores Law) - why has the development in the HD department been in a state of virtual stand-still?

    I am not sure if you are serious or not. If you compare the trends in storage to the trends in CMOS fabrication, you will find that the rate of change in storage capacities, price per MB, and transfer rates leave Moore's Law in the dust.

    Why is this? It is because CMOS benefits primarily from improvements in photolithography. Hard drive heads are made using photolithography as well -- and every time you can produce smaller chips, you can also produce smaller hard drive heads. This means they are more precise, and can squeeze more data into less space. If you improve storage density, you make hard drives larger, faster (you have to move the head less to reach your data), and cheaper (you can use fewer platters to store the same amount of data). There is research into the materials used to store the data itself. Any improvements in the materials also improves the density of storage. In addition, there is the control circuitry used to position the heads -- if you improve the control you can decrease the seek time as well as improve the accuracy of positioning -- this also allows you to use tighter track spacing, getting more data onto the disk. All of these effects combine, meaning that progress in hard drives does not just match Moore's Law, but exceeds it.

    Why not ditch this ancient tech and pour some more $$ into developing affordable solid-state disks?

    Because moving media is orders of magnitude cheaper and more durable. But if you are looking for research projects dealing with new storage technologies, why don't you start here [ibm.com] or here? [cmu.edu]

  • one by one each element in my computers are becoming silent. after so many years living in such a noisy environment means I have trouble sleeping without the noise I become so uncomefortable. soon I will have to buy a karma-moods cd of fan noises just so I can sleap in comfort
  • Are they using 'bels' in a way to confuse the issue and make the number seem smaller than units that are more commonly used? Kind of like $9.95 is significantly less that $10.00

    Wouldn't 2 bels be the same as 20 decibels? It's routine to measure fan noise in decibels and quiet ones are about 25 decibels. But using a different unit like "2 bels" makes it seem like the drive is REALLY quiet.

    anyone else think this?
  • As an owner of three old Seagate drives (150, 250, 520 Mb anyone ;-) I've always considered Seagate to make the nosiesest drives in the world.

    As the owner of an old Ford T, I have always considered Ford to make the worst cars in the world.

  • The term bel is used to indicate a factor of ten in a power ratio. Decibel denotes one-tenth of this factor on a logarithmic scale. Also, the choice of logarithmic scale has nothing to do with the model of human hearing.

    First, your response has nothing to do with my post. :)

    Second, the choice of logarithmic scale has everything to do with human hearing. We "feel" a linear increase when sound pressure varies exponentially. Hence the logarithmic scale.

    Slightly offtopic: that's the basis behind some very basic MIC encodings for phone voice: using a logarithmic quantization instead of a linear quantization (where the source signal is the sound pressure from the mike) with the same 8 bit/sample

  • deci is just the SI prefix meaning 10x, a decibel is equal to ten bels. The logarithmic scale would apply to all floating point forms of the bel just the same.

    Uh, not. The prefix for 10x is deca, not deci. So a decibel is a tenth of a bel.

  • Maxtor's been there, done that (Score:3)

    by DannyGene ( 31846 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @03:41AM (#120644) Homepage
    Maxtor has been doing this for a while. I bought a DiamondMax 60 about a year ago, and I've never heard a peep out of it. I tried to find some info on their site to link, but couldn't. I think they call it SilentStore, and it's been on most of their drives for awhile now. It is a bit disturbing for awhile, thinking that your computer isn't doing anything, till you look down at the blinking light! I'm not sure what the dB rating is on the Maxtor's, but if you've got a power supply and/or cpu fan, you'll be hard pressed to hear it.
  • The push for quiter drives isn't as much for PC's as it is for the so called "convergance devices".

    Nobody wants to listen to the hard drive in their Tivo when they're watching TV.
  • Use Gkrellm, it shows you:
    -harddiskusage
    -ethernet activity
    -processor usage
    -(virtual) memory usage
    -and more...

    I prefer my computer quiet, and my programs showing me what is happening.
  • Of course, if the head isn't sitting on the track and reading data into its buffers before the desired sector passes by, any request for the preceding sectors will require another rotational delay.

    How useful that is in practice would vary widely, I suspect.

  • Hah! (Score:2)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 )
    Today's computers are already silent! I remember my first job, they didn't have a place to put me, so I got stuck in the computer room. Taught me how to deal with real noise:

    Two Genicom printers - a 4440 line printer and a 3820 open carriage (those were fun when others were running reports)
    A large RS6000 box
    An old Prime Minicomputer with open reel 9-track vacuum tape-drive, and power supply with large loud fans

    Later, they gave me an office, but stuck the 4440 in there with me...

    Everything else was silent - we used Wyse terminals for everything...

    Today's machines can't be compared - in fact, I miss the drone of that power supply...


    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • But don't you just love the machine-gun sound of the line printer when it gets a 100 page print job? It's great to see people dive for cover the first time they hear it.

  • But I like the noise! (Score:5)

    by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @02:54AM (#120650) Journal
    It lets me know something's happening. The whacka-whacka of the heads seeking. Blinking lights on the panel. Status messages at the console. Kids these days don't know whether the darned thing's on or off!

    Sigh. There are times I really miss Vaxes.

  • The human ear (Score:5)

    by chrysalis ( 50680 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @03:05AM (#120651) Homepage
    "the human ear can't hear sounds below 2.5 bels"
    That's totally false. Humans can hear below 1 bel (except babies, older people, and people with ear diseases) . It's approximately twice the level of human breath.

    -- Pure FTP server [pureftpd.org] - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.
  • I knew a guy who started going deaf from sitting next to the mainframe fans, back when I was in the Air Force. They sent us all in for hearing tests.
  • the human ear can't hear sounds below 2.5 bels.

    Nonsense. BY DEFINITION, the threshold of hearing [www.sfu.ca], which is the faintest sound the average person can hear, is zero dB (decibels). 2.5 bells, or 25 decibells, is a sound pressure 10 ^ 2.5, or 316 times as large as the threshold of hearing.

  • Great. Now when your harddrive starts swapping
    like a machinegun, you won't be able to hear it anyway. Yet another way to hide M$'s inadequacies from the public.

  • Everytime I have had a system with a Seagate drive it has died within 3 years. I just assumed that they've built that into the drives.

    All the other hard drive brands have always lasted longer for me than I wanted to keep the computer.
  • You forgot seek-time vs. no-seek-time and fragmentation-affects-access-time vs. doesn't.

    Also, a filesystem written for a solid-state disk can be substantially simpler because it doesn't have to take into account the physical realities of a spinning disk--you don't have to agonize over ordering writes to different parts of the disk; you just shovel it out and forget it.

    You can add journaling information and other integrity stuff if you feel like it. But you don't have to worry about where it goes.

    --

  • That deserves a +6, Funny! (if such a thing existed).

    Or you can do it with the Sean Connery accent: "Comradsches, Thisch isch your captain..."

  • Lots of people are mentioning PCP&C supplies, but I've found Enermax [enermax.com.tw] power supplies to be amazingly quiet despite having two fans. They cost less also. My power supply is actually quieter than my PCP&C CPU fan. They aren't kidding when they say "whisper."
  • Actually you're more likely to damage the drive by switching it on and off. Continuous use doesn't do much damage usually.
  • Whacka-whacka? Oh my god, this person has Pac-Man enslaved inside his computer.

    -prator
  • Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) motor ... Fujitsu got that working in 2000 [storagereview.net] "They've debuted fluid bearing motors in their MPF series. First introduced by Seagate in its 7200 RPM Medalist Pro, fluid bearings rapidly faded away as problems surfaced from the heat caused by leaked fluid."

    As for the noise, the Fujitus MPD3084ATs I got in 1999 [storagereview.net] had very little. Oh well :)

    Fujttsu may not be performance beasts, but for reliability, coolness, and quietness, they took the crown long ago.
    --
  • According to the encyclopedia Britanica: one bel= .1 decibles. In other words, for those of you who dont remember high school physics, a 2 bel hard drive is very quiet.

    You've got it the wrong way around- 1 bel is 10 decibels. Remember that "deci" is the metric suffix for 10^-1, "deka" is the metric suffix for 10. These drives are 25 dB when seeking.
  • No, deci is 0.1x, while deca is 10x. There for a bel is ten decibels.

    But then, since nothing except bels are measured in deci or deca in the real world, I could very well have that backwards.
  • Comrades! This is your captain- It is an honor to speak to you today! And I'm honored to be sailing with you on the maiden voyage of our Motherland's most recent achievement. And once more, we play our dangerous game. A game of chess....against our old adversary...the IBM hard drive engineer. For 40 years, your fathers before you and your older brothers played this game...and played it well. But today, the game is different. WE have the advantage! It reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our transfer speeds - and they will tremble again - at the sound of our silence. The order is: engage the silent drive!

    The more I watch, the more I learn-

  • Actually, that's not the jet's engines. That's the APU. It's a diesel turbine (so it's a jet engine in some sense, but at most the size of a small car, including all the electrical components). It supplies 48V (I think) to the power bus of the plane, and also powers the starter motors for the main engines. That's what allows the cockpit computers and so on to function before they turn the main engines on, and to still function in the case of a flame-out. It's the rough equivalent of a car battery.
  • But I thought the Red October was dismantled! The caterpillar drive had some fatal flaws that would prevent it from ever being...

    Oh. Silent HARD drive. That's different. Does Alec Baldwin know about this?
  • It seems that Seagate just released a virtually silent hard drive. It emits only 2.0 bels while spinning and 2.4 bels while seeking; the human ear can't hear sounds below 2.5 bels.

    Human hearing thresholds are close to a tenth of the noise of this hard drive.

    However, ambient noise will almost always exceed 25 dB.
  • One bel is .1 of a decible.

    Right.

    And one deciliter is 10 liters. One decimeter is 10 meters, and you need to go back to second grade and learn it properly this time.

    20-25 dB is still rather quiet. One would never listen to radio or television at this level. Conversations are largely held at 50 dB and up.
  • I bought an IBM PC300GL (actually, my company bought it for me, but I digress)... I don't know what kind of hard drive it has, but I've never heard it.

    Personally, I feel more confident if I hear something. I like it quiet, but when it's seeking, I like to hear that, just a little. I don't know why.

    The only thing I can really hear on my 300GL is the fan, which itself is awefully quiet.

    Now, as someone else commented about CDs and DVDs, YES, PLEASE, QUIET THESE HORRIBLE CONTRAPTIONS. My CD on my work computer has a cache that's just big enough to allow the drive to spin down for about 1/2 a second during a big transfer. Then it spins back up and transfers more. It's loud, it's annoying, and it turns this 40 some odd X CD Rom to about 10X.



  • Do I type this at the DOS prompt ;-)

  • Seriously... pick up one of these [pcpowercooling.com]. Any power supply should be able to be retro-fitted with one of them. No need to buy a whole new PS.

  • Tech. support (Score:5)

    by Molina the Bofh ( 99621 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @03:39AM (#120682) Homepage
    - Costumer service, how can I help you ?

    - It's this damn drive you sold me. It's broken. I bought it, installed in my computer and it won't boot.

    - Uh, did you partition and format it before using ?

    - No, but I don't need to do it to know it's not working.

    - Why ?

    - Listen, kid, I know what I'm doing. I have experience with computers. I built mine myself. And this drive is dead. It makes no noise. And I just installed it, and, yes, the power cable's on.

    - (thinking) It's going to be a long day.
  • why not put an a/d and d/a on the mobo, with a better speaker, and use anti-noise to quiet the internal case noise down?


    Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
  • The stock 20GB Maxtor in my G4/400 is completely silent as well, I can't even hear it when I put my ear against the case (of the computer, not of the drive :)

    --
  • deci is just the SI prefix meaning 10x, a decibel is equal to ten bels.
    The logarithmic scale would apply to all floating point forms of the bel just the same.

    --

  • The problem with FDB... (Score:5)

    by edmudama ( 155475 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @06:23AM (#120705)
    The problem with FDB motors is they generate about 15-18C more heat in normal operation. You better have monster airflow around the thing if you want to keep the sucker cool.

    Most drives run around 30-35C in normal operation, and will guarantee they work up to mid-50s. (55C is pretty standard)

    Oh, and if your drive *does* overheat, then your FDB motor will start outgassing which will eventually contaminate the media, producing defects and lost data.

    They say they use "quiet" seek algorithms... A quiet seek = slow in most cases, since you get quieter by just not accelerating the heads quite so hard.

    Like the others, I'll believe it when I don't hear it...

  • Can't hear it? (Score:4)

    by kruczkowski ( 160872 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @03:24AM (#120708) Homepage
    Some of you clam that you want to hear the drive spinning.

    Why don't you connect the PC speaker the to HD LED? And if you want to be realy cool, install a knob to control the volume.

  • No regrets here (Score:3)

    by electricmonk ( 169355 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @03:49AM (#120711) Homepage
    I'm just now assembling the parts for a new computer myself, and I opted to go with some Seagate Ultra160 18XL drives. Even if they are technically "slower" than this new ATA drive, I am still happy I bought them instead. Why? For several reasons:

    Seagate makes notoriously crappy ATA drives. Their SCSI line may be great, but they have never made a name for themselves in the ATA industry.

    When was the last time you saw someone attaching more than 2 devices to an ATA channel? That's right, never. If you want to make a RAID array, you have to get at least two channels, and that's just for the hard drives!

    ATA/100 just ain't that fast when compared to the awesome power of Ultra160 SCSI.

    The most important reason: This product wasn't even out when I bought my storage system.

    However, it's good to see that this kind of technology exists in the market, and perhaps it will produce a trickle-down effect so that we will see cheaper drives equipped with this technology available to a wider audience.

    --
    < )
    ( \
    X


  • As an owner of three old Seagate drives (150, 250, 520 Mb anyone ;-) I've always considered Seagate to make the nosiesest drives in the world. I keep my file server in the attic, in a large box - and I can still hear it whirring.

    Some people say they like to hear the noise, it reminds them that it's still working. That's like saying they like channel logos to remind them what channel there watching. There are lovely little lights on the front of your box. They ain't just pritty ya know :-)

  • Is a lownoise 300w powersupply + fan to use with a Athlon thunderbird, and were rolling..
    Quiet PC [quietpc.com] do 250W and 300W quiet power supplies. The 300W is AMD approved.
  • A classic case of Pavlov's engineer.
    ---
  • What about CPRM?

    with the coming t13 / CPRM standards, I refuse to buy new harddrives. I simply do not want anyone placing copy controls in the firmware of my hard disk.

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
  • A decibel is one-tenth of a Bel.
    It is a measurement system that was developed by the telephone company to determine the output level of a line. dB can be used to measure voltage, and power, as well as sound.
    It is a relative measure based on a logarithmic scale. That is, 20 dB is 10 times the power of 10 dB. 30 dB is 10 times the power of 20 dB, or 100 times the power of 10 dB. You essentially double the energy with every 3 dB increase.
  • Indeed, 0db is considered to be the lowest sound level that a human ear can hear. 1db is the lowest change a human hear can notice. i think they mean something about out of the frequency range a human can hear (20hz-18000hz)
  • I'm not denying there's been developments with regards to size and transfer rates. However, as I said, we're still using spinning disks.

    I guess you could compare it to the automobile industry - which has stagnated in much the same sense (if not for the same reasons). While modern cars give more mileage pr. gallon than cars 20-30 years ago, it's still essentially the same old tech (petroleum products that go "bang"...) - despite the presence of newer, more economical and more environmentally friendly alternatives.

    I think we need a radical shift in R&D focus - towards physically smaller, higher capacity drives with a much higher stability and fault tolerance. My opinion is that moving away from the existing hard-drive technology is necessary to accomplish that.

    Solid state drives need not necessarily be the end-all-be-all. But it's a good path to explore.

    Hope that clears it up a bit?

  • Solid state (Score:4)

    by egjertse ( 197141 ) <slashdot&futt,org> on Friday June 29, 2001 @02:55AM (#120733)
    Why the tinkering with old technology? With the development that the rest of the computer industry undergoes (ref. Moores Law) - why has the development in the HD department been in a state of virtual stand-still? Except for speed and size (and now noise level) there is pretty much nil difference between HDs now and 40 years ago!

    I mean, come on!! It's 2001, and computers still have moving parts? Why not ditch this ancient tech and pour some more $$ into developing affordable solid-state disks?

  • No shit! I want to have my computer loud as hell! If I could add side pipes & have them blow fucking fire like Gone In 60 Seconds, I would! I have a totally obnoxious tower with fans out the ass just to pester the shit out of my fat-ass roomates. Quieter Computers - BAH!

    Of course this is still very cool, don't get me wrong... ;-)
  • People demand silent power supplies and quiet fans... yet they also want the 7200, 10000, and 15000RPM drives. These are much louder and uncomfortable in many cases than the "whoosh" of a fan farm.

    I have two 10000RPM drives and a 15000RPM drive in my server. If I had to do it over again, I would use 3 5400RPM drives.

    For those who don't know, the high RPM drives are more fatiguing/damaging to the ears because they emit a high-pitched whine from the spindle mechanism... if you've ever been outside an airplane when it's on the ground and has its engines powered up (though not throttled), it's that kind of whine.

    It gets so obnoxious hearing the "whining" of the drives go in and out of sync that I wear hearing protection when I can. Hearing protection looks strange, but it also reduces the "numbness" caused on the ears after a long day of work next to the drives.

  • why has the development in the HD department been in a state of virtual stand-still?

    While you may be thinking that spinning platters are all the same, the technological advances used to eek out more and more bits per area have been astounding.

    I think that storage technology researchers in this field should be given a lot of credit for what they've accomplished.

    Maybe, instead of railing against them, you can lead us into the new solid-state technology revolution. It's simple, right?
  • Don't worry mate, overheating isn't exactly a long-term problem, the last three days were the English summer, it's all over now, evidently proven today. Blink and you could miss it.

    I had an Athlon tripping alarms off when it hit 65c a couple of days ago, never seem that before.
  • I've had absolutely silent hard drives for the past 18 months. Four different drives, not a sound from any of them. Oh...wait... thats cause I lost my hearing 18 months ago :)
  • As ADSL is becoming available for ordinary users the need for quite web servers may increase. I have an ADSL from home but I really haven't made a web-site at the IP address because I wouldn't like the noise in my home... especially when I'm going to sleep. When I turn off the computer late at night (morning?) and go to bed, I really like the quietness.

    Call me crazy, but I just keep my PCs in a room other than the bedroom. I have 2 servers and 2 workstations runnnig 24/7 at my house (one of them is a web server) and I never hear a peep out of them when I sleep (unless I leave the speakers on and someone IMs me in the middle of the night). Problem solved.

    Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups. [thedaythatcounts.org]
  • I don't think that's quite right because the scale is logarithmic, i.e. 20 db is 100 times as loud as 10db. I'm not sure how bels and decibels relate; it does make sense that 10 decibels equals 1 bel, I'm just not sure how the log factor effects it.

    "What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
  • You know, this sounds great. A drive with "fluid dynamic bearing". I dunno, but this sounds like it might be quiter, but emits more heat in exchange. Which is a problem: I currently have two IBM Deskstar 75GXP that are quite silent, however they easily get hot enough to make cook some egg 'n bacon breakfast on them. So what good is a HD that is silent, but gets so hot you need an aditional fan to keep the air inside the case cool? On another note, I, like some other folks who posted above, like the sounds the HD's produce. You get some more information about what your computer is doing, plus, the sound the HD's produce (a low clicking and chirping... well, maybe not chirping. The seeking sound, you know) is not unpleasant, quite the opposite indeed. Unlike the humming of fans, which I consider to be very annoying. as for those 69MB transfer rate: Thats burst transfer rate, and you're certainly not going to get it when copying 60MB of MP3's from that drive... (plus, do you have a device handy thats able to write at that speed?). My next desk is gonna have a kind of mini-cupboard, into which I put the tower. open to the back for ventilation, and with an isolated door in the front so to dam the noise.

  • Re:Solid state (Score:4)

    by Liquid-Gecka ( 319494 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @03:46AM (#120778)
    Flash is still EXTREEMLY expensive. Companies like Micron [micron.com] and Samsung [samsung.com] are always looks for ways to drop the cost of solid state drives. Currently I have only seen a 4.3G solid state drive as the largest (Sorry.. no link at the moment) and, while it was fast, it was also extreemly expensive. (In the several thousand range.) It may have been quiet, but it sucked power at a far greater rate than any spinning media drive. Solid state sounds good on paper, and for some tasks it is good, but you have to think of this as a one or the other setup..

    Spinning Media vs Solid State
    Cheap vs Expensive (Pretty much no exceptions, no matter what you do silicon wafers are far more expensive than disks)
    Large vs Small (Solid state is still very restricted by speeds/sizes compaired to spinning media)
    Slow vs. Fast (With the right interface, if they both use IDE it really won't help that much)
    Small vs. Large power use (Even in a idle state flash sucks far more current than a motor. 11ma by 128 parts is 1.408a in its IDLE state)
    Loud vs. Quiet (Solid state is VERY quiet.. =)

    So, pick two or three areas that you are concerned with. If you want all the performance of a flash drive, with the cost of a spinning media drive you won't get a very large drive. Or if you want a large drive that is cheap, you won't get a quiet and fast drive.

    You know how the saying goes.. Good, Cheap, Fast... Pick two.
  • Is a lownoise 300w powersupply + fan to use with a Athlon thunderbird, and were rolling..
  • Fujitsu has had Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) technology for years. Just look for a Fujistsu drive whose model number ends with -A.

    And yes, they're really quiet. Quieter than a regular drive with a SilentDrive kit. It's gotten so that I won't buy anything else anymore.

    They're not totally silent though- remember that 2.4 bels is 24 decibels (a lot of people don't make the connection), and is undeniably audible. It's just really quiet. You generally have to listen for it to notice it.
  • A number of years back I started noticing how much noisier the new faster-spinning CD-ROM drives were getting. It seemed like some disks were noisier than other disks. Then I realized this was probably because some disks were more out of balance. I decided to start experimenting. I put little bits of tape on some disks to see how it would affect the sound of the drive. Little bits of tape made the drive a little louder, the more tape I added the drive got noisier. Then I got the bright idea to tape a small metal washer to a disk.

    The drive spun up after I inserted that disk and shook the case so hard that it was impossible to eject the disk. The roar rose up over the cubicle wall and threatened to draw attention to the experiment being conducted in R&D that morning. (needless to say this isn't the sort of experiment one does with personally owned equipment!) I ended up having to kill power and use a Macintool (one of those bent paperclips Mac users keep handy) to eject the CD.

    I've wondered for some time what has happened to reliability figures with the new 'rocket engine' CD drives. Surely reliability is being compromised to attain the higher performance on the faster drives. One of those tradeoffs where the '48x max' pad printed on the outside of the drive case becomes the only bullet point that matters.

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