DiskClick: Ever wanted to hear old hard drive sounds

I actually recently switched from my laptop to my desktop as my main work machine, and due to some weird partition choices previously (long story), I temporarily ended up with my /home/<work_user> directory on a btrfs filesystem that's sitting on top of 3 Seagate Exos 20TB drives (instead of my main NVMe).

Hearing the drives has been really nice actually, and got me noticing all kinds of interesting and sometimes unexpected behavior going on with my system, and actually helped find a bug with my terminal multiplexer.

With 64GB of RAM my entire home directory fits, so only writes go to the drives, and it's been surprisingly performant for my workloads.

Pretty confident that with posts like these, no marketer wants to come to HN and ruin our experience.

These eclectic sounds are for a certain types of individuals and there is no quantifiable commercial value for search engine juice.

Thank you for the audio.

I've been reliving the good old days to a limited extent -- I recently bought a Synology NAS, and before I move it out to the server cabinet, I have it sitting on my desk. How quickly I forgot how loud hard drives are. At least these drives are (16TB Seagate Ironwolf).

The "click of death". Sends an icy chill down the spine of any old timers who owned an Iomega Zip.

I want something like this built in to perhaps a little microcontroller module in my system so that from the moment of boot it sounds like a 1980's Macintosh. I thought of running a Macintosh emulator on a raspberry pi as a simple computer for writing, but one thing it would lack by default is hard drive sounds from boot (even if I ran this program after boot).

This needs an option to also play coil whine based on CPU load to be perfect

I would be fine with silence if modern systems were engineered to give timely notification of liveliness (vs press button, wait 30 seconds to see if it did anything, press a bit longer...)

I ran a BBS off an 80mb (huge!) drive with bad sticktion back in the day. Worked great because it never spun down by being on for the BBS, so mostly avoided clanging platters. It made a lot of unholy noises. Things kids today will never understand.

Many times you could also feel the hard disk vibrations through the desk.

Anyone else remember having arguments for years about how SSDs were the best option for many applications, with people who thought they just didn't work properly, and some who thought they would _never_ work?

I actually had a so-called expert who was brought in by someone else insist that my system be run on spinning disks because no SSD was reliable. Nevermind that I had carefully specified an Intel Extreme or whatever that was known to be reliable at the time (he had never heard of it).

I vividly remember the stress when your PC was loading an executable or something, then all of a sudden the system noises stopped indicating no activity, followed by the percentage bar sitting still

I always found the sound of 90s computers very cozy and soothing in a way.

I main a PC for which I actually bought spinning rust for /home. I'd seen enough SSDs suddenly give up the ghost to where I didn't trust them for long-term r/w storage.

Related sound: Hard drive head crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TeQpbF5wXc

Does it have an option to park the heads before shutting down?

That's a wonderful nostalgia trip but the sounds are slightly different from what I recall. Perhaps the shape of my beige case caused different sounds.

Its all fun and nostalgic until you remember you cant move the device while in operation

Those things were fragile! All your data! A week of defraging and praying

Nothing beats a well worn in Commodore 1541 banging its head against the mechanical stop. That's what I was hoping for.

Why isn't there a sound module for ssds? It's a no brainer, how come nobody came up with anything?

It seems to emulate fan noise, too!

I wish I could "hear" my SSD... to be able to notice unusual activity

I may see if I can find a sample of an old BBC Model B floppy being accessed.

No, no, no -- there is another sound round corner of one of those plates that can alter the course of your life. Be careful what you wish for.

The year was the early 2000s and the early years of my career. One fine morning, as I started up the work PC, it did its routine, including the HDD sound. I’m going to guess that sound was not the typical sound because that was the day the 2GB HDD (my guestimate, or it should be close to that size) decided to die on me, never to wake up again.

I went from the usual computer repair services to a few people’s homes who had advertised that they could “repair crashed hard drives” but failed. I remember the Bombay heat, the sweaty and frustrating walk asking for addresses in Lokhanwala, Andheri West, Bombay.

That took down all of my work and is one thing I will never forget. That taught me to have backups, and I didn’t break a sweat when a similar one happened in 2005. It wasn’t enjoyable, but I had pretty much everything backed up.

Yes, there is indeed a sound as lovely as it is, but a dreadful one that you will remember. Be careful.

I was trying to do this for cpu coil. I miss hardware feedback.

I feel like Nullsoft Beep fits this category.

thank you guys for your words and advice i did not except this to blow up

I could tell what phase my desktop was in the boot process by listening to the HDD. Being familiar with autoexec.bat and config.sys, I could even isolate which command was being run. And then Windows begun loading and everything was just a blur of clicks for a while.