PERFORMANCE OF HARD DISK DRIVES IN HIGH NOISE ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

Digital information stored in rotational media, such as hard disk drives (HDD) needs to be reliable and readily accessible. Although various studies have been performed on the modal analysis of HDDs and the noise emitted during operation, few researchers have addressed the effects noise can have on the performance of HDDs. Analysis performed by Siemens Corporation, IBM and Tyco Fire Protection Products shows that HDDs are sensitive to external disturbances such as tones, broadband noise with tones, and broadband signals. This paper focuses on identifying the critical frequency ranges and the levels of noise where the performance of the drives reduces. A series of tests has been performed using filtered noise in one-third octave frequency bands at sound pressure levels ranging from 80 dB to 130 dB (re 20 mPa) in an anechoic chamber. A detailed description on the test set-up along with the methodology of testing has been provided. Read/write speeds have been used to measure HDD performance. A completely random read/write workload with varied data packet size has been incorporated through a custom LabVIEW program. Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives have been used for the analysis. General trends in performance curves of enterprise HDD, laptop drives, helium filled HDD and non-helium filled HDDs are shown. HDD performance is shown to be sensitive to sound pressure levels as low as 85 dB (re 20 mPa) at some frequencies and the frequency range from 4 kHz to 10 kHz has been found to be most sensitive to HDDs performance.