R&D: Acoustic Annoyance Study of HDD for Laptop

IEEE Transactions on Magnetics has published an article written Yichao Ma , Seagate Singapore Design Center, The Shugart, Singapore , Cheng Siong Chin , Wai Lok Woo , and Bin Gao.

Abstract: “2.5-in hard disk drives (HDD) have been widely used in many mobile devices including laptops. HDD noise is becoming a major concern to the HDD industry, but the quantification of human feelings regarding HDD noise annoyance has rarely been studied. In this paper, the attempt to establish a relation between psychoacoustic metrics and HDD noise annoyance is presented. A social survey has been conducted to determine a range of the most affective and annoying HDD noise on people. Two sets of jury tests have been performed to quantify the degree of HDD noise annoyance. The obtained results indicate that the psychoacoustic metrics have a close relationship with the HDD noise annoyance and different age groups.“