14 DAY TRIAL // Nothing could keep a design from being improved, other than the lack of financial revenue, and when you have ideas it's the best thing to just take advantage of what you know and try to accomplish as much as you can with it. For the hard drive industry, going from ATA to Serial ATA meant the change of a concept once familiar to many through design improvement. And the task of keeping their heads above the floating level with the new competition that was brought by the SSD drives means that new features must be added in order to maintain superiority.
In this case, semiconductor manufacturer and consumer electronics mogul Samsung Electronics has taken the first move in the right direction with a new series of hard drives that are said to be "ultra silent". The SpinPoint S166 Series introduced 3.5-inch hard drives with an upgrade to SilentSeek and NoiseGuard technologies Samsung used to "accelerate operational speed while reducing noise." The SpinPoint T166 Series were part of the previous generation of drives and were also the first drives Samsung had produced with a 166 GB per platter data density, hence the name.
TJ Lee, vice president of sales & marketing at Samsung Electronics' Storage System Division said: "Samsung is constantly pushing the technology envelope with the introduction of new and innovative products that meet the computing needs of today's most demanding customers and operating environments. This latest technology development by Samsung in the new SpinPoint S166 Series makes our high-end, award-winning hard drive products attractive to a wider audience by even further reducing acoustic noise and improving disk data transfer speed."
The main advantage of these drives, of course, is that they are silent during operation, and, according to benchmarks performed by Samsung, the 80 GB and 160 GB hard drives of this series generate an average 24 dB in idle mode and 27.5 dB in seek mode, compared to 28 dB in idle mode and 32 dB in seek mode for previous generations. The low noise level also means that these drives are a very popular solution for DVR and PVR consumer electronics and office computers.
Three additional technologies are implemented in this new series of hard drives, an improved fly-height control, an optimized actuator assembly and an upgraded System-on-Chip (SoC) controller, which allows for better read write sensitivity, improved reliability due to mechanical function resistance to shocks in operating/non-operating mode and significant data transfer speed, thermal and power consumption enhancements, respectively.