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Comment by EamonnMR | Hacker News Reader

There's a part that tries to recreate it: https://www.retrokits.de/index.php/hdd-clicker-hdd-sound-sim...

Or you could get a secondary mechanical HDD :-P. Last year i got a 18TB mechanical HDD for extra storage in my desktop and the noises it makes are like as if the platter is made of stone and the headers are digging it to store the data :-P. After 10+ years of using only SSDs - and the HDD being quite more noisier than the HDDs i used for most of the late 2000s - the clonky mechanical sounds were outright nostalgic.

Some "new" hdds are absolutely insanely loud.. I got some recently where having 3 in an otherwise quiet case made them very audible from the other end of the house! I sent them back.

Looking at the datasets for the WD Red Pro for example, there's idle/peak dBa from 34/38 for the 10TB to 20/32 for the 20TB

34 dBa idle. Are you kidding me?

I ended up settling on the 18TB btw, as that's all there was at the time, 20/36 dBa.. and quite happy with them, and they're "normal loud". Noticable sitting next to the pc, more so when active, but not from more than a few metres away - and ZFS doing a scrub no longer sounds like a an industrial accident either, so thats nice.

Most hard drives have a very little known feature called “Advanced Acoustic Management” that allows you to inform the firmware of the drive that you want to prioritize noise over seek speed, and it will gently accelerate and decelerate the moving heads.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_acoustic_managemen...

Enterprise-oriented HDDs (which I assume includes your 18TB one) are a lot noisier than their desktop counterparts. I'd expect that e.g. a 3TB WD Blue would be virtually inaudible compared to your drive.

Yeah it is a datacenter HDD and noise isn't much of an issue there i assume. I have a couple of other systems with mechanical HDDs that are barely audible, but they aren't 18TB either :-P.

I bought that one because it was big, relatively cheap and read on /r/DataHoarder that datacenter HDDs are slightly less likely to have issues (not sure how realistic vs superstition that might be though, main reason i got it was because it was big).

I don't even care about the noise but I would want a mechanical drive because I suspect it will last longer. Most of my hard drives from the early 90s still work. When they fail, they fail gracefully--just mark a few sectors as bad, maybe replace a part of the head. I view most non-mechanical hard drives these days the same as cd-roms, usb sticks, etc., they can't be relied on for long-term storage.

Not the same

Even spinning rust disks these days are very quiet by comparison.

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