garnett@cs.utexas.edu (John William Garnett) (12/16/90)
I've heard a lot of people commenting on the relative noise levels
of the various hard drives that will work with the NeXT. In particular,
many people seem to like the Fuji drive with the five year warranty
except for the fact that it makes more noise than other drives. I'm
in the process of looking for a drive and am curious to find out
just how loud the Fuji is. I have a request for someone out there
who has a Fuji drive (or any other brand for the matter): how about
using the NeXT (and an attached microphone) to make a sound file
demonstrating the noise level of the harddrive. This sound file
and associated text comments could be posted on one of the NeXT archive
sites. If anyone wants to volunteer to set up a directory on one of
the archives to hold this information, please do so and post a note
to comp.sys.next letting everyone know where.
In order to allow listeners to make valid comparisons between various
recordings, those doing the recording should follow some common
guidelines:
0) make sure the recording area is quiet - in particular make sure the
optical disk is not inserted.
1) position the microphone 12 inches (30.5 cm) away from the cube on
a perpendicular from the center of the front of the cube.
2) on an otherwise idle system, run the following command:
find / -print
(if anyone has a better idea regarding what activity to have
the system perform while the recording is going on, let me know)
3) record for approximately five seconds.
4) name the sound file using the following concatenated fields
a) first six letters of the drive name
b) model number
c) .snd
5) make a separate text file with the same name as the sound file except
for a .txt extension containing the following info
a) your name (optional)
b) drive name and model number
c) drive capacity (formatted)
d) how long you've been using the drive
e) short description of any problems
f) quality of technical support from manufacturer or
company in charge of support.
e) general comments regarding the drive including whether or
not you've tried it under NeXT 2.0 or on a NeXTstation or
new NeXTcube (did it work?)
6) watch for (hopefully) forthcoming directions about where to post
the collected information.
--
John Garnett
University of Texas at Austin
garnett@cs.utexas.edu Department of Computer Science
Austin, Texasisbell@ucscf.UCSC.EDU (Art Isbell) (12/17/90)
Due to different microphone sensitivities, I doubt that John's method will be very informative. What's needed is a standard reference sound level to calibrate against. I would propose the following modifications: In article <1030@nada.cs.utexas.edu> garnett@cs.utexas.edu (John William Garnett) writes: > >0) make sure the recording area is quiet - in particular make sure the >optical disk is not inserted. > 0) make sure the recording area is quiet. 0.1) insert the optical disk containing your original software release. > >1) position the microphone 12 inches (30.5 cm) away from the cube on >a perpendicular from the center of the front of the cube. > >2) on an otherwise idle system, run the following command: > > find <OD_label> -print > > >3) record for approximately five seconds. > 3.1) remove the optical disk. 3.2) on an otherwise idle system, run the following command: find / -print 3.3) record for approximately five seconds. > Because most of us still have optical drives, this modification should tell us how loud the HD is relative to the OD. For those with NeXTStations and/or no OD, I don't know what to recommend as a reference sound level. -- _____ ____ Art Isbell |\ | | | | \ 315 Moon Meadow Lane NeXT Registered Developer | \ | ___ |____| | | Felton, CA isbell@ucscf.UCSC.EDU | \ | |___| | \ | | 95018-9442 (408)438-4736(B) | \| |___ | \ |___/ (408)335-1154(H)