Seagate Drives for Quiet Storage

New desktop Barracuda drive combines high storage capacity with silent running.

Rex Farrance, PCWorld.com

Seagate has announced what it calls the world's only virtually silent hard drive: the Barracuda ATA IV.

The company says that its use of a new SoftSonic motor with a fourth-generation fluid dynamic bearing allows this 7200-rpm 80GB IDE drive to offer top-notch performance while keeping sound levels below the threshold of human perception.

The drive, which is currently in volume production and shipping to distributors, will be available by the end of July. Seagate says the drive will be priced competitively with other high-performance 7200-rpm hard drives. (Similar-capacity 7200-rpm drives are currently going for about $275.)

When it comes to hard drives, silence is golden, according to Mark Geenen, founder of TrendFocus, a hard-disk-storage market research firm.

"The consumer market for hard disk storage will ultimately create a huge demand for silent high-capacity hard drives," Geenen says. "Think about the time you set the VCR in your bedroom to record a show in the middle of the night. Odds-on when it came on, it woke you up. That kind of noise level will be unacceptable in a hard disk device."

Being able to build a silent drive now will put companies ahead of the game going forward, he says.

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The Ultra DMA/100 Barracuda ATA IV packs an impressive 20GB per disk surface, allowing each platter in the two-platter drive to hold 40GB. The capability to deliver these high capacities using fewer platters and read/write heads decreases the cost of manufacture and theoretically improves reliability.

According to Seagate, it takes strong technical chops to provide this combination of capacity and performance.

"We believe that the FDB motor will ultimately become essential in every hard drive," says John Paulsen, a Seagate spokesperson. "This bearing technology allows the read/write head more accurately to follow perfectly round tracks of data, which makes a big difference in being able to provide the highest data densities and the fastest performance on PC hard drives," he says.

Seagate provided the drive with a 2MB internal cache and rates it as being able to provide internal transfers up to 555 megabits per second (equivalent to about 69MB per second) and an 8.9-ms average seek time. The drive's Ultra DMA/100 interface allows for burst transfers up to 100 MBps. To further boost the drive's reliability, the company incorporated its 3D Defense System data and diagnostic protection.

While Seagate acknowledges that the development of the SoftSonic motor provides great potential for consumer applications, the company says today's target buyers will use the drive primarily in more-traditional PC applications. Those include gaming and other fast home and business systems, along with entry-level servers, ATA RAID setups for video editing, and inexpensive network-attached storage devices.

Seagate says that consumers in even these PC-centric applications will appreciate the benefits of using a silent hard drive.