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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.
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/
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.)
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
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LEDS softly blinking,
Yet no hum of cooling fan.
What evil magic this?
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.
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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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.
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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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.
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?
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.*
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.
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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.
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.
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."
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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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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
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?
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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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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!
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
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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Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
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
A classic case of Pavlov's engineer.
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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.