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Seagate Claims New Drive Silent and Fastest
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.
I'll-believe-it-when-i-hear-it?
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?
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.
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.
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 - 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)
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/
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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)
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.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
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.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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...
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My Journal
I think they mean decibels. There is a diff you know. ARG...I know only enough physics to become annoyed by such statements.
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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.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
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.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
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 (Well, at least the online version)
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
Blimey. Genuinely impressive. Now I only need to buy myself eight televisions.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
Have a read of The Innovators Dilemma - When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail - 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.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
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!
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I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
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.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
They DO have a name in the ATA industry. It's "Mud."
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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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.
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 or here?
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
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
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 the owner of an old Ford T, I have always considered Ford to make the worst cars in the world.
-- Colin
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
-- Colin
Uh, not. The prefix for 10x is deca, not deci. So a decibel is a tenth of a bel.
-- Colin
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.
*Life is too serious to be taken too seriously.*
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.
nosig today
How useful that is in practice would vary widely, I suspect.
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 - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
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.
Best Slashdot Co
Sigh. There are times I really miss Vaxes.
Best Slashdot Co
"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.
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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.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Nonsense. BY DEFINITION, the threshold of hearing , 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.
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.
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This is not my sandwich.
Or you can do it with the Sean Connery accent: "Comradsches, Thisch isch your captain..."
--- if y cn rd ths y cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmmng!
Lots of people are mentioning PCP&C supplies, but I've found Enermax 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.
Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) motor ... Fujitsu got that working in 2000 "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 had very little. Oh well
Fujttsu may not be performance beasts, but for reliability, coolness, and quietness, they took the crown long ago.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
Where "X" is your cdrom drive. This will set the filesystem readahead to maximum, so when it does spin up and starts reading it will read for longer.. Dunno though. You seem to have a retarded cdrom drive either way. You might also want to try this:
This command will set your cd drive to transfer at 20x. You could also try 30x or 35x. See what works.
If I remember my school physics correct. Bel is a very large measure so we decibels to measure sound. I think it is decibels not bels. 120 dB is the threshold of pain. So 2 bels is roughly 16 times of that.
It should be 2 decibels not bels.
Slashdot: Tabloid for the nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter.
Here's one way to make your hard drives seem quieter - use an abit bp6 with 2xglobalwin FEP32 fans. You can hardly hear the drives then as the fans drown out everything (including thought and sanity).
On a more serious note, I've taken to using my old k6-2/300 more lately just because of the noise Its summer now here in the UK, so I have to remove the case or else it overheats... in winter its just about bearable...
Karma makes sense. It makes a lot more sense if you add reincarnation.
HD's have been making huge jumps. Nobody's interested. While that 137GB Maxtor drive could hold a lot of pr0n, I have 35 mirrored gigabytes at home for _all of_ my personal storage/archives, not just pr0n, and I barely put a dent into it.
The end users that do need this kind of space are the ones with DV cams, but they need expensive SCSI disks to do things properly. I've seen people try it with striped IDE, but the SCSI solution always wins.
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E2 IN2 IE?
Maxtor/Quantum's tech is called Quiet Drive and was out in 1999. But their drives are all above 3 bels. For example, all the 5400RPM drives are 3.3 bels. They have a whitepaper touting this technology that shows all but the least Fireball drives to be above 3 bels. The new Seagate drives are 2 bels (reportedly) ... huge difference.
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“Doh!”
I would suggest that is why he said 3 drives, to set up a raid to get back some of the performance.
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?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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.
From the Britannica dictionary we get the following:
And their encyclopedia entry states:
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.
Seriously... pick up one of these. Any power supply should be able to be retro-fitted with one of them. No need to buy a whole new PS.
SilentDrive can accomodate up to 5w heat output, which they say is average for 5400 RPM drives. This drive, at 7200 RPM, should work fine.
-c.
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Casey
More scratches on the cave wall, thanks be to anonymity.
- 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.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
i need my computer on to sleep, i know its weird but after a year of sleeping 3 feet away from my computer and its 8 fans, i can no longer sleep with out them even when i go into a server room, i get sleepy because of all the noise
Expect Apple to include their next revisions - they're nuts about silent computers.
That sound has become a part of me. Whenever the power goes out in my room (I didn't do it, honest!) It'll cause my to jump up at 5:00 or whenever it happens, it freaks me out when I hear all my hard drives spinning down at once, especially since most of em are from the 80s and louder than ever.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
You know... most channels (atleast here in sweden) have a sort of discrete logo in one of the corners of the screen all the time. And i got no problem with it, as long as it isn't moving or flashing or something similar! *condemns vh1 to hell*
Same thing with harddrives, i don't mind if they make some small sounds when they are working, as long as it isn't unbearable. My computer fans makes a hell of a lot more noise then my harddrives anyway.
it's just not that hard to setup a linux box to do all my e-mail, and serve pages for my friends, and any other assorted projects.
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
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.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Anand's "News" headline thing on the left is a merging of the four "News" sections he has. The Seagate "story" is under the Press Releases section which is why it's pretty much verbatim as with everything else in that section.
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 :)
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You can get a special small cable to attach between the two 10k drives to sync the spindles (for RAID purposes, but works even when not using RAID), as long as they're both from the same manufacturer.
One way to cool a pc would be to attach a copper strap on the cpu at one end, and the other end to the case. This would probably cool the cpu with just surface area.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Hey, even some of us Yankees have ten fingers AND know how to count on them.
KFG
They are my actual initials.
But I like "Kentucky Fried Geek."
KFG
If the harddrive is silent then the only sounds I'll hear are the fans and my weeping.
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This
The main problem related to loud PCs, esp with the giant heaters otherwise known as x86 processors, is heat and airflow. The P4 and Athlon chips produce insane amounts of heat and video cards and northbridges now have THEIR own fans. A 128MB stick of PC133 RAM pumps out 10W of heat. Add case fans, and all you do is push hot air over all the heatsinks in the system.
The trick is to get the heat out of the box, then exchange it into the environment. Watercooling is the answer. (Or buy a Mac cube, with no fans).
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You've either got some very quiet machines, or a very loud ceiling fan!
Assuming it's the later, where did you get these amazing machines?
Now if only the CD and DVD players would shut up when they are spinning a disc...
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...
More data, damnit!
>there is pretty much nil difference between HDs now and 40 years ago!
:-)
I dunno, I'd say the difference between rectangular and cylindrical counts as a major change...
That and the size -- modern hard drives are much smaller than their older cousins. Try comparing an IBM microdrive to a washing machine sized drive from the 70's.
CPUs haven't changed all that much since the 70's either, if you look at them the same way you're looking at hard drives. Still silicon, still encased in ceramic (or plastic).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
But i LIKE hearing my drives, its the only way of kooing if your computer is doing somthing somtimes!
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.
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X
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
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.
Someday I'm going to be a good enough woodworker (or rich enough to hire a good woodworker) to make a desk like that. Don't forget the second cupboard to hold the laser printer...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
As an owner of three old Seagate drives (150, 250, 520 Mb anyone
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
Stiction is a static buildup that causes the heads to stick to the drive platters. Since the motors in the drives aren't very powerful, the disk wont spin. Usually you can break the disks free by removing the drive, holding it level and rotating it back and forth along the axes of the spindle. I haven't seen a drive do this in several years.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
Do they say how many bels it emmits while the head crashes into the platter destroying all my porn and haxor'd documents?
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
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You CAN put higher wattage drives in a SilentDrive box. You just have to make sure the heat is adequately dissipated. I have two SCSI drives in SilentDrive enclosures, one 7200 dissipating about 7 watts at idle, and one 10K dissipating 10 watts at idle. Each drive enclosure is solidly mounted to the computer case to increase the effective surface area of the heat plates, and a 12V fan wired for 7V operation blows outside air directly over the plates. Everything stays cool to the touch, and quiet too!
A Fluid Bearing Spindle has the following positive characteristics, amongst others:
It's quiet.
It's smooth (very low non-repetitive runout, low rumble, ideal for low flying height heads).
It also has the following negative characteristics:
Unidirectional (you can't run it backwards, or it self-destructs, but who cares for a drive).
Sensitive to orientation (The drive probably won't run upside down, or will suffer severe loss of MTBF if run upside down).
Generates more heat and has more drag than ball bearings. This will heat up the case and put more load on the power supply.
Requires very tight operating tolerances - if a part is a touch out of spec (as little as 50-100 millionths of an inch) it can toast the spindle.
Just FYI if you decide to go with this drive. I remember some years ago Seagate made some prototypes with this technology, they had zero time between failures. The company I used to work for also experimented with this technology, and every product was a flop. Your mileage may vary.
does it make a bel?
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Blarf.
If you can't hear it, you probably have a hearing deficiency.
The fans, HDDs, etc. don't bother me.
BUT, the cubicle neighbors who refuse to turn off key-clicks, talk(more like shout) on the phone all day, leave their ringer up so high ("It lets me hear it when i'm in xxx's office") so that it startles you when in deep thought, and of course in flu season: the snorting, sniffing, blowing, talking just to hear yourself or gain sympathy instead of going home (Trying to pass it on to everyone at work?)
That really bugs me. Loud HDDs can be tuned out, rude co-workers cannot.
Headcrashes? Is that going to still give some sound? Ah. The lovely click clack of a damaged harddrive is like sweet music to my ears.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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?
^]:wq!^M
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?
^]:wq!^M
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...
2.5 Bels?! You've got to be kidding! That's 250 decibels - louder than a jet engine, and certainly above the pain AND I beleive even above the death threshold.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
Hmm... seems to me that my Seagate Ultra160 15,000RPM x15 is a little faster than this 7200PRM IDE heathen! Methinks it's time to take back the night! Common Seagate, more SCSI goodness!
Tom: (singing) Pork chops, cream puffs, candy bars... Crow: (singing) Meat sauce, Cheetos, Mallomars...
Why not submerge a computer in a non-electrolytic liquid. A side-effect would be that you now have a good heat sink. Surely problems like oxidation and corrosion could be successfully dealt with .
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
Are you serious ? The noise from your 3 drives is causing you hearing damage??? How close are you to the drive ? Given that the noise from even the loudest drives I have ever been around is certainly far less than that of normal conversation, I would think the only way they could damage your ear is if you removed the casing, honed the edge of a platter to be razor sharp, and cut your ear off. Or maybe you could do it if you cut off the leads from the cables, exposed the wires at the end, then jabbed them so far in your ear canal as to rupture the tympanic membrane.
I think I skipped the class where we learned about exaclty how quiet 2 bel hard drives are.
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.
I'd imagine most people trying to detect or repair this sort of thing have their cases off and their fingers on the drive to detect vibrations. Working at a data recovery firm we would take the drives out of the towers and attach them via some custom long cables to allow for detecting repairing these sorts of things. These drives really shouldn't make work any tougher.
It's not Anand, Its just a direct copy of Seagate's own news release. http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/relea ses/article/0,1247,1156,00.html
A relative of mine is a lawyer for someone who is involved in a lawsuit (Along with someone at MIT) for patent infringement on noise reducing technology against Seagate and Compaq (And possibly some others I am not aware of.) His client was apparantly to have been involved with selling the technology, which was developed at MIT. I am not sure if it is the same technology in question here, (My relative is covering a matrimonial dispute, and not this! And to be honest, I don't really know the details) but if it is it makes me wonder whether the technology will see the light, (under Seagate auspices at least)
-Daniel
"You can take our lives, but you can never take our Flerbage!!!!"
But now I have my big computer with the two cooling fans, hard disk that sounds like a table saw and CD-ROM that sounds like a DC-10 engine running at taxi speed. I turn all that off at night and turn on yet another salvaged air purifier fan.
Frankly, I can manage with earplugs in the Data Center. Make those SCSI drives cooler, and make me happy.
- Dan I.
Couldn't they just say "heat sink" ?
I think this is what happens when you hire buzzword enabled language proficients into your external-company-image division as media notification generators. ...er, I'm sorry, that should be "non technical PR people."
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 :)
Even worse, he got bonked on one of the ring corners. That's one for the photo album to traumatize the kiddies with later.
R T. htm
h tm l
Notable quoteables:
"Shawn Gaitan, 24, who brought his 7-year-old nephew to the event, said: "I think it's really messed up that they kept on with the show. They could at least told us what was going on. We worry just like the other people worry."
Gaitan said he saw Owen flying through the air; his head hit a turnbuckle and snapped back."
And "The World Wrestling Federation announced to its stock holders in a press release today that its second quarter earnings will be affected by a $7 million charge related to settling the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Owen Hart's family"
Google search [ "Owen Hart" death ]
http://www.denizine.com/1999/mactavish/052799HA
http://www.tennessean.com/sii/99/05/24/hart24.s
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
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.
So why not take one of these and then put it in a SilentDrive box?
btw, I've got a low noise Quantum (4400rpm, 2.5-3 bels or therabouts) in one of these and it's good, but not great. i.e. I can still hear it as it gets towards night-time. During the day though with normal room levels of noise it's 'silent'.
also, SilentDrive is available from quietpc.com for UK people.
if you're a man you will just mod your fans from 12V to 7V and you will barely hear them. once you've done it there is no way to go back to 12V. works get more pleasant and productive, A LOT.
keep it simple.
http://www.cnssystem.com/product1_e.html This looks like the thing for a quiet PC - is anyone in Korea willing to check it out and post a review?
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.
...I LIKE all the misc. noises my computer makes.
:)
I'd miss the grinding(or squeaking, as the 13 year old 286 does), the whirring, the spinning, and the general drone.
The only time my computer is silent is when power's out, hardware is being added, or it's not feeling well.
The noises let me know it's healthy
http://pebkac.net
Silent drives will certainly make it harder to tell if your drive has stiction. Since you can't hear it, you can't just listen to it and hear the drive motor spin up to speed or fail.
Well , I need to watch the budget. The AMD chips help out in doing so :o)
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.
typo in above. I meant to say a qualitative change occured.
this may sound weird, but I like to be able to hear my HD working. While being quiet is a nice thing to show off to your mates ("look it doesnt make any noise, wowww!") it isnt practical in my opinion. My drive rattling is the only way i know that Windows hasnt died. Increased rattling means I should defrag etc etc. With a drive I cant hear I'd have to look at a damn LED all the time =) Marvelous accheivement though, but surely we should have moved on from magnetic discs by now?
ghaa.
You kids have it too easy these days... In my we didn't have silent hard drives. In fact we didn't have computers. We had to sit there and make our own thrashing sounds if we wanted to simulate swapping. And we liked it! Bah!
_______________________
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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.
If I'm not the only one who fell that way, there will be a market. And an interesting one as well. I would expect the Internet to become even more interesting when we all get our home web-sites. I'm not talking about static web-pages, you can host at any web hotel, but really fancy-computer-internet-servers running weird services, games and stuff we would love to see.
At least that what I would put out there... if I could get a silent server.
Saggi
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
Couldn't this be a problem? Sure, I'd love to have one in my Linux boxen (I pretty much use Linux all the time.) But, think about all those 'doze users still left out there... without all the seek racket, how will they know if their box is still alive or not???
:P
That's one thing I appreciate about the noise, I can tell if the 98 box is still alive or not....
(I can see it now... people constantly resetting their XP boxen because they think it's hung, due to the fact that no racket is taking place... now's a good time to get OUT of tech support.)
oopsy my bad. I'm sorry my mistake. It's friday. Gimmi a break
Many vendors have drives designed for use in radio and television studios. These drives are quieter than the standard models, have pretty good performance, and don't require enclosing them in a box (unless you want to). An example is the Quantum lct20.
I was one of the engineers that worked on this project, and while I can't get into what we did with it (as our competitors will find out as soon as the reverse engineer them), the drive is incredible. It really is silent, running at under 2.5 bels (not decibels). On top of that is the fact that the silence belies the speed at which it operates. As a member of the Barracuda family, it is fast enough to stream eight movies simultaneously, in DVD quality, without dropping a frame. And no, there is no heat problem, because if there was, it would never have gotten out the door.