Consumer technology giant Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., today debuted the newest in its SpinPoint line of hard drives, promising super-quiet, high-speed operation.

The new 3.5-inch Samsung SpinPoint S166 drives feature updated versions of Samsung's low-noise technologies -- dubbed SilentSeek and NoiseGuard -- which enable toe 7,200 RPM drives to produce up to fifteen percent less noise than competing products, according to the company. The drives, available in 80GB and 160GB, produce 24dB and 27.5dB, respectively, Samsung said -- lower than rival solutions, which it said produce on average 28dB and 32dB.

Additionally, the drives also offers a number of improvements designed to boost speed and reliability. These include new fly-height adjustment technology, optimized actuator assembly, and an upgraded controller -- the latter of which provides thermal, transfer speed, and power consumption enhancements, Samsung said.

It's not surprising, then, that Samsung expects the drives to find fans among home theater PCs, DVRs, and similar applications.

The drives ship with 8MB caches, and are available in SATA 3.0Gb/sec. (with NCQ support) and PATA versions.

"Samsung is constantly pushing the technology envelope with the introduction of new and innovative products that meet the computing needs of today's most demanding customers and operating environments," said TJ Lee, vice president of sales and marketing at Samsung Electronics' Storage System Division. "This latest technology development by Samsung in the new SpinPoint S166 Series makes our high-end, award-winning hard drive products attractive to a wider audience by even further reducing acoustic noise and improving disk data transfer speed."

The drives are slated for availability this month. Pricing was not disclosed.