Optical Drive Performance and Emitted Airborne Noise

摘要

A main source of operational noise in personal computers is the optical disk drive. As the performance of the driveshas increased, so has the noise produced by the drives. LMS curve fits using a log function were applied to soundpower data from over 600 optical drives. The sound power level of notebook drives has remained about the same forthe past few years since the performance has leveled out at a 24X sequential read rate. However, desktop opticaldrives have made step increases in performance over the past few years, going from 24X to 32X to 40X to 48X.These step increases in performance have resulted in the drive rotational speed increasing from about 5200 rpm to10000 rpm. The increased speed has resulted in the mean value of the optical drive sound power level LWA to gofrom 4.1 bels for the 24X drives to 5.2 bels for the 48X drives. Further increases in optical drive sound power levelsmay be limited by customer acceptance and by European label noise limits.