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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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