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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.

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Similarly, hard drive seeking noise used to feel something like the heartbeat of the computer. When it went silent and all you heard was fans you knew something was up and a force reboot was likely in your near future.

I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning closer to the latter than the former. The cheap drives bundled in bargain basement sorts of machines were some of the worst.

I've had several hard drives fail over the years. They all signalled their impending doom by making interesting noises so I never lost any data. When my SSD fails I think I'm going to miss the noises.

I've worked with lots of (enterprisy) hard drives and SSDs. The hard drive failure rate was easily 10x the rate of the SSDs, but the SSDs basically never gave symptoms of impending doom. They just disappeared from the data channel. We did have one group of drives that gave symptoms... 50% of the batch dropped dead within 2 weeks of entering service, a good number failed over the time it took to get the rest of them replaced. And one drive that had very poor throughput for several minutes did show SMART metrics that it was reallocating sectors, but we took it as a sign of death and replaced it; I think it might have worked fine once it calmed down, but we'll never know.

This, SSD failure modes are scary! Even enterprise SSDs will just go from "all ok" to "no device connected" at any random time.

So far, most of the HDDs I've seen fail, gave _some_ indication prior to it, via smart or "strange" behaviour.

Which is weird because the only microSD card I've ever had fail on me locked itself into write-protect mode, allowing me to get my data. I wonder why SSDs don't do the same.

They're supposed to, and I've heard anecdotes that they sometimes do, but it seems like many of the failures I've experienced were firmware failures (in some cases, upgrading firmware on remaining drives seemed to result in lower failure rates anyway). Firmware failures have no rules; spinner drives sometimes have them too, and they might disappear from the bus as well, although usually those will "just" disappear after a reboot, not in the middle of a request.

Anecdata is interesting. Here's mine, I've recently had a spate of a few Dell system 3-5 years old getting progressively more sluggish. Quick tests don't turn up issues. When I'm given the time required I use the hard drive manufacturer's testing utility and do thorough testing at which point damaged sectors start to turn up, not too many but enough to cause seek issues or something. I use chkdsk to attempt to recover data and mark the problematic sectors and at least for a while the system are a bit better. Of course, as soon as possible replacements are needed.

One day I rebooted my desktop and my C drive SSD was just gone. No warnings of any kind, great performance until it died.

I've always distrusted SSDs, and manufacturers continue to use lower quality controllers and flash, including sometimes changing a currently great drive to use cheaper components and sell it as the exact same device.

Meanwhile games load from my spinning rust within a minute, and SSDs never seem to actually improve that that much, because the code responsible for parsing and loading RAM seems to matter more.

You think hard drives were loud? My dad had a dot matrix printer.

Loud is a typist typing away ferociously on an IBM Model M.

You should have heard my teleprinter. Hooked up to my Nascom-2 with the UART driving a transistor that in turn drove a reed relay for the 170 V (I think) signal. It was only five bit code so I had to write a driver for it.

They still use them at a lot of checkin gates.

You can tell boarding is about to start because the dot matrix starts printing the final passenger manifest.

Thanks, now I feel really old.

Seriously though, until very recently you could hear dot matrix printers at most airline gates. They used them to print out manifests to hand to the crew right before the plane departs.

I recently replaced an 80MB hard drive in a 1991 computer with a Compact Flash card. The computer is now silent, with no moving parts at all.

It's much more enjoyable to use.

The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?"

The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.

>"Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?"

Yeah, even in my poor country, people were quick to replace them with USB thumbdrives. Floppies were just too damn unreliable, especially when using school/public computers.

But, for us students back then they provided a nice emergency escape. When we had to hand over our assignments on floppy, and we didn't complete them in time because lazy, we would open the .doc assignment file in notepad as binary, delete some random data, then save it to floppy. It would be 2-5 days till the professor would get back to you saying "the floppy you gave me was corrupted, please resubmit your work ASAP" and that gave us enough time to finish it.

Thank you for your sacrifice floppies.

I'm surprised this was your experience, because I lost many more USB thumbdrives (especially in the early 2000's) than I lost floppies.

You mean lost, as in they got misplaced, right? I used to transfer files a lot with usb sticks and had one fail only once.

No, I mean lost as in “broke down”.

I may be a statistical anomaly, but although modern USB sticks are pretty reliable, I experienced an awful track record w.r.t. the ones from the 2000's-2010's.

What kind of crappy floppies were you using? In my experience, floppy disks were astoundingly reliable as long as they were handled correctly (and even when not), up until the late-90s when they became vestigial and manufacturing quality dropped. Back in the 8-bit micro days, they worked extremely well.

Hard disagree, peoples homework missing was a daily occurrence and frustration.

Drives being out of alignment and incompatible with other drives common.

Yes, floppys can work really, really well. But I haven't encountered anything since that wasn't orders of magnitude better in this department.

Unfortunately we had to wait until usb-drives to become ubiquitous before we had a reliable way to transfer files between random computers.

What kind of super floppy were you using?

I remember my Z80 with TR-DOS and 5.25" floppy controller. We all dreaded that "Disk Error. Abort,Retry,Ignore?" message. That meant time to copy floppy again, and with just 48KB of RAM, there was a lot of floppy swaps to do this.

I literally never saw problems with floppies with the Apple ][ or other micros of the time, or even with MS-DOS, up until the 1.44 became king and then people started moving to CD-Rs and other things. At that point, the drives became cheap junk (there were large, noticeable differences in the internals between a late-90s floppy drive and an early-90s one: much bigger and nicer motors for instance) and the media was terrible.

Spent time repairing computers in college. Replacing the disk drives was a very common task for lab computers.

I managed to spend 3 hours assembly and disassembling this one machine before finally figure out that my test floppy had gone bad.

Another one was this student whose assignments were constantly being erased.

After watching him go through the motions of what he was doing, I asked him if his bracelet was magnetic. Problem solved.

The speakers buzzing just before getting a SMS text is the closest I’ve gotten to predicting the future.

Speaking of that... Why did that go away? Less 3g? Moore speakers with better insulation?

TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) isn't a thing anymore.

It was a peculiarity of the 2G signal. While the frequency of the signal itself was high enough that it did not interfere with speakers, the channel was shared between phones using TDMA, in which the channel is divided in fixed-size slots, and a phone transmits in only one of these slots while remaining silent for the rest of them. It's the envelope of these transmissions (transmit for a while, stay silent for a while, repeat) which caused the interference with the speakers.

According to Wikipedia (if I understood it correctly), the interval between the start of one transmission and the next one is 4.615 ms, or 9.230 ms for half-rate, which corresponds to 217 Hz or 108 Hz (if I did the calculations right), well within audible range.

Newer cellular standards use CDMA or OFDMA instead of TDMA, so they do not have that same low-frequency on-off behavior.

Well, TDD, which means the base station and the phones take turns transmitting on a single frequency, is still possible in 4G and 5G. How often the switch happens is configurable by the operator and in 4G can range from 1ms for phones and 4ms for base station, to 3 ms for phones and 2 ms for base station. So, just the directional switching shouldn't be the full story (and even though I used to work on base station radio software goes beyond my understanding. Too near the digital processing side, I guess :)

Did it go away?

When we are on Teamspeak/Mumble with friends, we can always tell who will be receiving a text in the coming seconds; I assumed the headset wires were acting as an antenna and catching the SMS radio signal.

When I play electric guitar with a phone in my pocket I can still hear interference. Not as satisfying as in the GSM era, now it is just noise as opposed to a recognizable pattern.

It was such a consistent swing pattern, too.

Behold the Floppotron!

https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY

I've fallen deeper and deeper into the nostalgia of retro computing YouTube channels. They're amazing (and make YouTube tolerable). They have all kinds of interesting devices and adapters to make SD cards appear as SCSI HDs for old Macs (or whatever), I think even floppies and such going as far back as the Apple II.

One of my favorite things is when they bolt on a HDD sound simulator that provides all of the conveniences of the SD card emulators while still providing something approximating that "HDD sound" we all remember[0].

Not quite the floppy "ca-chunk" and feel of (relatively) muscling the eject button but in the same vein.

[0] - https://hackaday.com/2022/09/26/tiny-dongle-brings-the-hard-...

At around 1990 as a high school student I was working in a wholesale supermarket and in the office they had a microcomputer (IIRC a MicroVAX) which had audible database transactions. Every time one of the cashiers scanned an item, you could hear the hard disk move into place to write out the data. I found that endless fascinating for the same reason.

One of the earliest computers I worked on (ca. 1968) was an IBM 1130. Its disk drive (5MB, I think) used a voice coil. I'd set up a Fortran compile, then walk to the other end of the (smallish) building to get a coffee. There was a particular clunk kind of sound as the compiler started to write out the object file. When I heard that, it was time to go back to the machine room.

I liked the old floppies. They were great for backing up personal data. They were easy to write on and store in special trays.

I still haven’t discovered a convenient way to handle flash drives. They are to small to write on, and so I have a pile of them tossed in a box, and I have to search through them to find the right one.

Anyone have a good way?

We had the same problem with floppies, yes you could write on them more easily. But we were still forced to have multiple of them stashed in draws, the same way we did with CD's.

Solution is to buy a portable SSD drive and be done with it.

I'm surprised they don't make NFC Floppies that look exactly like a real floppy, but store a few MB you access with NFC. Since everything is mobile first it would be a really nice way to hand someone a PDF, although credit card size is more practical.

It's fast enough for a megabyte or two, and sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge.

I have not found any good way to keep track of flash either, aside from using fewer and larger ones so it's all in one place.

sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge.

Yeah, what the hell is with that? If I need to send files between phones I can use an app, but there's no telling when they'll stop developing it and it'll stop working. It's gotten to the point it's easer to copy a file onto my network drive and then recopy it to the destination device. When I'm away from home, though, I usually have to grab an actual USB cable.

> > sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge.

> Yeah, what the hell is with that?

Back in the early 2000s, we had IrDA which could easily transfer files from one device to another through OBEX. Not much later, we had the same OBEX but now on top of Bluetooth. We still have Bluetooth; it should be easy to send files between phones (and even computers) through OBEX. Last time I tried, however, it was a pain, failing more than half of the time. I gave up, and now use syncthing for that.

We have Nearby Share, which is awesome, but doesn't help much if the other person has an iPhone, or you've got a Windows/Linux.

I expect it might be solved in a few years, as long as no Apple products are involved, but for now we're still stuck taking pictures of each other's screens if we need something fast.

I miss old-school IM platforms. I could just see a family member online and say "Here's (link), do we want to go to this activity on the weekend", or "Here's the photo of the cat you wanted."

I suppose I could host a local IRC server on a RasPi or something, but that's way more convoluted.

Current IM platforms work just as well for that, aside from the fact people are starting to not like Facebook and half your friends might not have it. The main problem is if you don't have cell service and need to transfer a file, or if the file is on a machine without IM set up for some reason or another.

The idea I just had would be write a number on them. Should be space for two or three digits. Then keep table with contents for each number.

Edit: I guess I haven’t used USB drive in while cause they don’t have place to write. Would have put label sticker on them, or printed label from machine.

JFYI, something like that did exist (but unfortunately didn't have success):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33957246

Minimalism is trendy, especially in recent times, but there's an argument to be made that there is irreplacable usability in something being Big and Chonk.

Chungus data mediums, connectors, etc. almost never go missing or break from simple daily use.

Buy a luggage tag if you want more surface to write on?

I put each one in a tiny (2" x 3.75") reclosable plastic bag, and include a slip of paper with the details written on it. These bags are sold for use by people who do beading.

I keep the bagged flash drives in a small cardboard box.

The Apple Pay bell sound is the most satisfying modern sound. It also makes use of the vibration motor to make it feel like an actual bell has been struck in your phone

I shoot on DVCAM tape a bit, and I have to say there are few things as mechanically satisfying as putting one of the full-size DVCAM tapes into the camera and hoisting it onto your shoulder.

Turning your V8 over and having it cough into life is very satisfying.

...and the feeling of relief at the fact that, unlike a USB drive, it'll never turn into something else like a keyboard and perhaps do something malicious.

I got you. https://youtu.be/EV41cwEzqO4?t=42 not my video though

Similarly its terrifying when you hear the drive clunking away on a bad disk when you know there will be an error before the screen shows it.

In a lab that I hung out in as a student... there was a wang semi compatible (it only had 512k of base ram rather than 640k) that linux was ported to (there was some fun with LILO if I recall correctly).

This machine had a voice coil for its hard drive ( https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI for some disassembly of one of them ... and some nostalgia of a big drive chunking away) and when it did its seeking / calibration the hard drive would beep... not intentionally, but that's the sound it made.

The problem was, this was a rather flaky drive (swapping over NFS was faster than swapping to disk)... but eventually those bad blocks were isolated and files were allocated there... and moved to /beep on the system. If you went to /beep and cat'ed all the files, the hard drive would beep.

The memories I have are more connected to the sound of the floppy drives on an Apple II, it was very special. It's probably connected to the fact that I was relatively young, and the feeling of using an active computer and software - but there was something special with the Apple II, I think I connected the stripes of colours with the sound somehow. But it was magic to listen to that sound while loading a floppy. Which is why the emulators don't really work for me..

To this day I still once in a while hear something using the old Mac floppy drive reading noises to indicate "computer is doing something"

The same cannot be said of computer fans unfortunately -- they were annoying then and are annoying now.

I found the zip drive way more satisfying! Minidisc wasn’t bad either.

CDs are the least satisfying though. Fiddly, easily scratched, long time to spin up, can get wedged into tray, laptop CD drives are flimsy too.

There's something that reminds one a little of a knight stabbing a dragon with a sword when you're forced to yell "When I say stop I mean STOP, you son of a bitch!" and ram an extended paperclip into the manual eject hole.

The sound of a disk II digesting a 5.25 floppy is even better.

I found similar enjoyment in mini-disks.

MO is not really modern, but the sound is great.

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