Let’s say you’re building a HTPC (home theater PC) or even a desktop for your office and you want to keep the noise to a bare minimum. Besides fans, your biggest noise culprit is probably going to be your hard drive, which can make anything from a weird whirring noise to a nasty grinding noise when copying files. Samsung has fixed this with a new line of silent hard drives called the SpinPoint S166 Series.
The new drives will be up to 8 decibels quieter than other drives while retaining the same 7200 RPM, 3Gb/sec speeds.
The drives will ship with 8MB caches in SATA and PATA versions.