Liquid bearing motor technology
The spindle motor and seek motor inside the hard disk drive the operation of the hard disk, which is also the source of noise. Ball bearing motors were used in early hard disk motors. At that time, due to the low speed of the hard disk, the noise was very small. However, with the increase of hard disk speed, ball bearing motor has brought many problems, such as wear, temperature and noise increase, and has become the main source of hard disk noise, which obviously has not adapted to the requirements of hard disk development. In this case, hard disk manufacturers have successively introduced hard disks with new liquid bearing motors.
The technology of hydrodynamic bearing motor has been used in precision machinery industry in the past, and its technical core is to use mucosal liquid-oil bearings and replace balls with oil films. Compared with the traditional ball bearing hard disk, the advantages of liquid bearing hard disk are obvious. The first is noise reduction and cooling. Avoid the direct friction between the ball and the bearing metal surface, and minimize the noise and heat generation of the hard disk; The second is to reduce vibration and noise. Oil film can effectively absorb vibration and improve the seismic capacity of hard disk; The third is to reduce wear and improve the reliability and service life of hard disks.
Seagate produced the world's first FDB motor in 1996, and then introduced the first hard disk product with liquid bearing motor. So far, FDB cars have developed to the sixth generation. At present, desktop hard disk manufacturers Maituo, Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi (formerly IBM hard disk), Samsung, notebook hard disk manufacturers Fujitsu, Toshiba, IBM and so on. Basically, there are hard disks with liquid bearings.
◎ Other hard disk noise reduction technologies
In addition to the use of liquid bearing motor technology, major hard disk manufacturers also have their own unique "kung fu" to deal with hard disk noise. Let's take a look at the noise reduction technology of different brands of hard disks.
◆ Seagate hard disk noise reduction technology.
Once upon a time, Seagate's IDE hard disk almost became synonymous with loud hard disk, but all this vanished with the introduction of barracuda ATA IV hard disk. The application of sound shielding technology (SBT) makes Seagate's hard disk the quietest IDE hard disk at present. Sound shielding technology includes the following items:
Soft acoustic wave hydrodynamic bearing technology: Soft acoustic wave motor is the core of sound shielding technology (SBT) of Seagate hard disk, and it is also a technological breakthrough appreciated by various computer users. According to the industry standard test, the noise emitted by the cool fish ATA IV single-disk model is only 2 bells when rotating, 2.4 bells when seeking, and the sound below 2.5 bells is inaudible to human ears.
SeaShield cover and soundproof foam: SeaShield cover is a metal baffle on one side of hard disk circuit, which together with soundproof foam can further reduce the possibility of noise leakage. Rotary rectification technology: By controlling the working current waveform of the spindle motor, the start and stop of the motor are more stable and smooth.
Silent seek technology: mainly includes speed limit, acceleration limit, current shaping and timely seek. Because these technologies are complicated, I won't introduce them in detail here.
◆ Maituo hard disk noise reduction technology
Since the acquisition of Quantum, Maituo's hard disk business is booming. In addition to applying its own noise reduction technology, Maituo also adopted many technologies of Quantum Company, including QDT mute technology. The combination of powerful technologies makes Maituo's hard disk have higher technical content and competitiveness.
Maituo silent store technology: actually, this is not a new technology. Maituo put forward this noise reduction scheme long ago, which was called "acoustic management" at that time. The principle of this technology is to add a control program to the BIOS chip of the hard disk to artificially reduce the reaction speed of the magnetic head power arm, that is, to reduce the seek speed, thus reducing the noise.
Because this technology will slightly reduce the performance of the hard disk, and the noise problem was not very prominent when the 5400 rpm hard disk was the mainstream a few years ago, it was not applied until the 7200 rpm hard disk became the mainstream. Users can download the latest control program from Maituo official website, Maituo's AMSET utility, which is used for Maituo's hard disk with silent storage technology. Decompress the downloaded program to a floppy disk, and then use this floppy disk to start the computer and run the Amset program.
Amset.exe has four parameters, namely/Quiet,/Fast,/Check and/Close. /quiet mode can reduce hard disk noise, but it will reduce performance. /Fast mode allows a slight decrease in performance in exchange for noise reduction, but the noise reduction effect is not as good as that of/Silent mode; /check can check the current mute mode of the hard disk, /off will completely turn off the noise reduction function option, so that the hard disk can run at the best performance.
QuiteDriveTechnology used to be the hard disk mute technology that Quantum Company was proud of, but with the acquisition of Quantum Company by Maituo, this excellent technology naturally belongs to Maituo, which can control the hard disk noise below 3.0 rings.
◆IBM hard disk noise reduction technology
As the initiator of Winchester disk structure that all desktop hard disks follow at present, IBM has always been in a very important position in the field of hard disks. However, since the second generation of Longteng, the problem of high hard disk repair rate has cast a shadow on IBM, and now IBM has sold the hard disk division to Hitachi, but in any case, the technical content of IBM's hard disk is beyond doubt.
Noise reduction technology of IBM Drive noise suppression system: When this technology is applied to IBM's desktop hard disk, it mainly includes ceramic spindle motor, improved voice coil motor and three-layer top cover to reduce noise transmission. With the application of these advanced technologies, the working noise of IBM Longteng fourth-generation hard disk is only 3. 1 bell (3 disks) to 3.0 bell (2 disks or less).
Hydrodynamic bearing technology: This technology is applied to the Deskstar 1 80Xp series hard disks released by IBM on June 65438+ 10/day, 2002, which is the same as Seagate's SoftSonic liquid bearing technology and can greatly reduce the noise of hard disks.
Automatic acoustic management: this technology is similar to the silent storage technology of Maituo Company, which reduces the noise by reducing the seek speed of hard disk. However, the tool IBM Feature Tool provided by IBM, compared with the sound management tool of Maituo, is not only gorgeous in interface, but also powerful in function. This is a toolkit, including sound management tools. Through the sound management tool, the hard disk can be switched back and forth in two working modes, one is the quiet seek mode with low noise, and the other is the normal seek mode with high performance. Noise is greatly reduced by slightly reducing the performance of the hard disk.
◆ Samsung hard disk noise reduction technology.
For Samsung hard disk, some users may not be very clear. By the end of 1999, Samsung's hard disk production capacity reached120,000 pieces per month, but at that time it was mainly supplied to the market in the form of OEM, so Samsung's hard disk products rarely appeared in DIY market. However, as early as then, Samsung's hard disk set up the product characteristics of high performance, low noise and low working temperature, and enjoyed a good reputation in the industry. At present, Samsung's hard drives have entered the China market in a big way, mainly divided into V series with 5400 rpm and P series with 7200 rpm. These two series of hard disks adopt Samsung's unique hard disk noise reduction technology, and the mute effect is quite remarkable.
Noise guardian: It mainly includes three aspects. First, the sound insulation sheet is installed on the top cover to further prevent the internal vibration from spreading. Secondly, the design and structure of the top cover are improved to reduce the noise generated by the spindle motor. Finally, the design of spindle motor is improved to reduce the vibration caused by high-speed operation.
Silent seek: The principle of this technology is to optimize and fine-tune the driving waveform of the voice coil motor through a special DSP (Digital Signal Processor) to smooth the acceleration of the head arm during seek, and reduce the seek noise of the voice coil motor while ensuring the seek speed as far as possible.
Page 6: Computer Noise Reduction Strategy-Another method is to mute the hard disk.
A, set the hard disk automatic sleep function
For example, through the BIOS power management setting option, select the appropriate hard disk shutdown time, or set the appropriate hard disk shutdown time in the WINDOWS power management option. If the system does not access the hard disk within the selected time, the hard disk motor will automatically stop running. Generally speaking, this method is not practical. First of all, it can't eliminate the harsh noise caused by head seek when reading and writing files continuously. Secondly, the hard disk is powered on and the number of times the head starts and stops is limited. In the early days, the trouble-free working time of hard disk was about 300,000 hours, while the number of times the head started and stopped was only1-30,000 times. The upper limit of the latest IDE hard disk head started and stopped was only 654.38+10,000 times. Frequent hard disk hibernation not only affects the continuous working speed of the system, but also shortens the physical life of the hard disk.
B, the latest overall design
Because there are too many noise sources in the computer, it is difficult to completely solve them by one or two methods, so some people have put forward the design of "cabinet-type" and "split-type" computers, that is, putting the main chassis of the computer in the cabinet with the front panel closed or in another room to make it "invisible, inaudible and trouble-free". Theoretically, this method works best, but you must have a long signal line, and it is not convenient for you to switch CDs or floppy disks frequently.
C, hardware transformation
If you want to keep your ears quiet, try to choose those drive brackets with thick shells, no big openings, good fixity and low noise of power fans, such as Patriot's "Moonlight Box" series.
If you have to choose those cheap cases because of lack of money, you can also do some remedial measures. For example, you can pad some soft cloth at the bottom of the chassis; Tighten the screws on the chassis and add soft washers; The interior of the box body is lined with sound-absorbing materials such as foam plastic board; Changing the placement position of the chassis can also get good results. It's just that most of those sound-absorbing materials have poor thermal conductivity, so we should pay attention to the problem of ventilation and heat dissipation.
Page 7: Skills and Playback-Set search mode to reduce hard disk noise.
For any storage device that uses magnetic head reading mode, increasing the rotating speed is always the most effective way to improve the performance. But there are gains and losses. When we rejoice in the high performance brought by high speed, we have to put up with the noise that comes with it. Obviously, we must choose between performance and noise. However, it is embarrassing to abandon anything. Therefore, the manufacturer provides a software that allows users to switch working modes flexibly and let us find an optimal balance point. Maxtor, IBM and other hard disk manufacturers have all introduced seek mode switching software. Here, we take the acoustic management of Maxtor hard disk as an example to introduce it to you.
Acoustics management software is mainly composed of file amset.exe, which can only be run in pure DOS interface (running in Windows MSDOS window will give an error). It should be noted that two conditions must be met to denoise the hard disk using amset.exe. First, your hard disk must support Maxtor's silent storage technology. You can visit Maituo official website. There is another condition that many people may ignore: when using silent storage technology, your Maxtor hard disk must be connected to the master bit of the motherboard IDE controller, whether it is the master disk or the slave disk. If you don't do this, amset.exe won't report the error, but it has no practical effect at this time. In addition, if your motherboard has a RAID control chip, then the silent shop is also incompatible with it!
Silent shops are divided into two levels according to the degree of control: quiet and fast. If mute is selected, the disk will enter the silent seek mode, at which time the noise is obviously reduced and the disk performance is greatly reduced; If fast is selected, the disk will enter the fast seek mode, at which time the noise will increase and the disk performance will be improved. The main executive file of acoustic management is amset.exe, which has four command parameters: when entering amset.exe/Quiet, the silent mode is turned on; Enter amset.exe/Fast cut-in fast mode; When amset.exe/OFF is input, the noise reduction function is turned off. At this time, the hard disk has the highest performance but the loudest noise. Enter amset.exe/check to check the running status of the current hard disk noise reduction function.