HDD Clicker generates HDD clicking sounds, based on HDD Led activity

It's not really possible to replicate the HDD sound with anything so simple.

Because what you hear on a real HDD is the seeks, and the seek time of any SSD is close enough to zero that it probably won't even show up on the HDD LED. All that's left is the data transfer, which are more or less silent on real mechanical HDDs.

That's part of the reason why it was useful to have the HDD LED despite fact you already had the loud HDD. The LED showed data transfer, while the sound indicated seeks.

To be fair, hard drive noises come in many registers (heh). The Maxtor drive in my 1995 HP Vectra sounds much higher than the drive in that video. The drive in my 1998 Compaq laptop is even higher than that.

Granted, the most distinctive noise of the Vectra's boot sequence is the moaning of the floppy drives, not the hard drive.

Quite nostalgic about that floppy disk "check disk" boot sound.

I know it's a yelling at cloud position to take, but it really does feel like we lost a lot of the human connection to machines when we ditched that kind of physical media. Switches that physically actuated the eject mechanism, clicks, clunks, scrapes, covers and slides. It all felt real and you could weirdly build a relationship with the object, hear it struggle and whine or working away. You could snap a floppy disk in anger or fawn over it in hopes of repair or recovery. You could maybe stomp on a USB stick but you'd probably need a hammer.

Obviously it was all slow, somewhat prone to breaking or gumming up, etc. There's a reason we moved past it but the most my computer (the thinky bit of it) feels like it exists now are its fans and they're no fun really.

I can't abstract myself from the reaction to Alien & Starwars set design where everything feels very tactile. Maybe I like that because I'm old, maybe Gen++ also thinks its neat.

I'm replacing the old fluro lights in my shed, that have been in there since it was my dads shed, some are probably 20 years old and I realised how much I like the "burrr ping ping tick ting PING". The space speaks to me when I enter, hello how are you lets do something. The LEDs just turn on, bang, light.

This can be resolved by sampling a real hard drive's sounds (spin-up, idle, spin-down, short seek, long seek, big klonk etc.) and playing it back in plausible sequences and variations. You might have to add some mixing capability as well since the motor will drone on constantly.

On the ultra realistic end: take a dead hard drive, trim the head assembly back so it won't touch/scratch the platter surface, remove its original PCB and replace it with the simulator which now will be responsible for driving the motor and the voice coil. If there is some space left for SSD storage, slap that on as well and use the original power and data connections.

You’ll never need more than 5MB.

I think you flipped your links.

But then you need to install something. Probably give it some perm.

Under MS-DOS such utilities existed and it was also used to demonstrate interrupt hooks in assembly tutorials. To do this, they'd:

- change INT 13h (the disk access routines in the BIOS) handler address

- write a handler that clicks the speaker or draws something to video memory without modifying any input registers

- pass the input over to the original handler which will complete the disk operation

- return or remove the return address of the inserted snippet from the stack and let the original handler do an IRET

The end result is e.g. an ASCII smiley face blinking in one of the corners of the screen in text mode or a similar style of crackling/screetching from the PC speaker.

Here is a full-featured example: https://github.com/MobyGamer/softhddi

;) That's why I only buy HDDs with voice coil actuators and auto-parking controllers.

I didn't realize you could get Taptic Engines. I had wanted some about 10 years ago while I was working on a haptic data glove project, but Apple kept them under tight wraps because they own the patent and wanted them exclusive to their devices. I ended up using small pager motors, but I really think Taptic Engines would have made for a much better experience, both because they are smaller and because they are 3 axis linear vibrators, instead of a single axis rotary vibe.

I've got 16 3.5" hard drives whirring and chugging next to me. I do not miss the sounds. If I could afford the same setup with SSDs I'd do it in a heartbeat. The heat is another story.

It's probably this discussion about DiskClick: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39406098 (DiskClick: Ever wanted to hear old hard drive sounds - Feb 2024 - 81 comments). Also, the software was last updated 1 month ago.

I’d love a 1541 noise emulator.