Fujitsu Ltd says it has produced a virtually silent disk drive in anticipation of a booming market for a new category of storage device for the home. The Japanese manufacturer’s Silent Drive is a standard 3.5 format device which supports the UDMA 66 interface but, unlike other 3.5 drives, the Silent Drive offers whisper-like 22dBA noise performance.
The 22 dBA level is very quiet. The human body at rest resonates at around 10dBA, and while the logarithmic scale of decibel noise measurement means a 22dBA device is six times louder than the human, this is still four times as quiet as today’s quietest conventional drives. In most practical circumstances, said a Fujitsu spokesperson you will not hear the disk drive spinning.
As a standard format device the Silent Drive can be used with PCs, but Fujitsu says it is really intended for use in set-top boxes and other home electronics products. With interactive TV about to take off, people will start to download and cache data to their set-top boxes. People are used to noisy disk drives in the office and in PCs, but they don’t want them in their living rooms a Fujitsu spokesman said.
Silent Drive is already available in single and double-platter versions, both capable of either 5,400 revolutions per minute or 7,200 RPM, and in capacities ranging from 6.4GB to 13.6GB. In January 2000, a 20.4GB version will also be available.
