6 ms·
HDD Clicker – HDD Sound Simulator
- theragra 4y agoThis is genius. I'd buy this in m2 or 2.5 inch form factor, for fun or to make practical jokes
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoThat'd be hilarious! I'd love to find one of these after being shocked to discover my SSD system started sounding like a hard drive. Especially if it was appropriately sync'd to actual reads and writes on the SSD.
- systemvoltage 4y agoThe underlying reason why hard disk sounds are appealing is the same reason why progress bars are appealing. They provide feedback that this mysterious box is doing something. Good (unintentional) product design.
- brody_hamer 4y agoI recently started getting some slight audio interference when there's activity on my network card. It's like a sixth sense into the packets flowing over the wire. I can hear how a video stream buffers, or how network-heavy a loading web page is.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoMy zen3 desktop build reused a decade old PSU, and inductors would whine when scrolling in a web browser and stuff. Then I got a 6800xt GPU, and the PSU died the morning after overclocking and stress testing the GPU. The new PSU seems quieter.
- bee_rider 4y agoI used to get some significant interference from my mp3-player/headphones when my cellphone was about to go off. "2G" (not sure they called it that at the time) interference actually had a pretty good tune to it. da-Da-da da-Da-da da-Da-da daaaaaa.
- perryizgr8 4y agoA good way to detect a network loop is to stand a bit further from the rack and see if any lights on the switches are blinking in sync. Much quicker to see this pattern than "show interface stats" on telnet and check the numbers.
- whoopdedo 4y agoI've developed a pavlovian response of listening for noise when the computer is taking longer than expected to tell if the process has hung.
- layer8 4y agoI recommend Progressbar95, which provides progress bars and great HDD sounds, among other things: https://youtu.be/aTM8wxMIIx8 https://youtu.be/aTM8wxMIIx8
- copperx 4y agoThose sounds irritated me to no end when the disk was thrashing because it meant that the computer was about to or had just became unresponsive. It also indicated insufficient caching. "Why is the disk spinning endlessly? I just clicked the open dialog! Did the OS suddenly forget about the 10 files that I have in my home folder?"
- sgtnoodle 4y agoI tried a windows ext2 filesystem driver once. It killed the drive after a few days, presumably from wildly moving the read head without any intelligent sequential movement scheduling.
- jraph 4y agoSeems coincidental. I would not expect a drive being killed after a few days only.
- systemvoltage 4y agoPeople get frustrated with progress bars too but that's kind of orthogonal to what I am saying. HDD thrashing around is not the problem with the feedback mechanism (that's working just fine), but the underlying equipment has failed. Progress bars are notoriously annoying when they just don't move! Don't hate the progress bar, blame the equipment. I know there are some fake progress bars out there...just shows that giving feedback is so important that people fake it even!
- Moru 4y agoThe fake progress bar is still filling a function. It shows the computer didn't completely freeze up. There was a time when that was a big question. Did my computer freeze up and I need to press the power button? The mouse cursor might be hidden on the loading screen so you have no idea if it's working or crashed.
- accrual 4y agoThis is fantastic. I build retro PCs and I'm converting one from a 5200 RPM disk to an SSD next week when my adapter arrives. One of the things I'll miss for sure is hearing the disk spin up and access while I work. For some, the sound and feel of real hardware is definitely part of enjoying the hobby. I still use real floppy disks instead of a Gotek for this reason, despite their flaws.
- system2 4y agoThis is fun but I think it is missing the head movements. This only makes a click noise when there is an hard disk read which is not always the case for hard disks. Head movement creates different noises.
- matthewhartmans 4y agoI love this! Love these little hack projects, super cool!
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoThis reminds me of a script I wrote at work. A lot of us do our compiling in VMs. This means we're left out of all of the fun of hearing fans spin up for large jobs. My script fixes that by polling top over SSH every few seconds and modulating the volume of a looping fan sound by the load average. I think you could make a pretty good product by doing something similar (varying beep, boops and clicks) for database accesses, server reboots, etc. and making an acoustic uptime monitor. Keep it in a pinned tab and you'll notice right away when your web server's RPS goes way down or way up.
- xenomachina 4y agoYears ago, a friend and I talked about a similar idea. We called it a log file "audiolizer" (as opposed to visualizer). The idea is was you'd tail log files through it, and it would produce sound based on the log lines. The hope was that you'd learn what things should normally sound like, and if it started to sound "weird", you could investigate.
- the_third_wave 4y agoHave a look at Peep (the Network Auralizer) [1] for an example of such a tool. I had this running about 24 years ago when traffic on the 'net was a bit more manageable but turned it off when I got fed up with the place sounding like a jungle. [1] https://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html https://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html
- forgotmypw17 4y agoI do something like this with the text output of my scripts, when debug mode is enabled: https://imgz.org/i6DpehGZ-1280.png https://imgz.org/i6DpehGZ-1280.png Each character corresponds to one line in the debug log, and is determined (via hashing) by the subprocedure writing to the log. It gives me a "general feel" of what's going on, and makes it easy to, at minimum, detect infinite loops.
- manmal 4y agoIn Xcode, you can edit breakpoints such that they emit sounds when they are hit (and continue automatically). Depending on the sound pattern you hear then, you can decide whether something fishy is going on.
- neilv 4y agoUser can be alerted to SSD device errors by the simulated sounds of a hard drive head crash.
- nmg 4y agoWhat I want is an FDD sound simulator for various historically significant computer models. The Tandy 1000 is burned in my memory, and I'd love to hear it again without having to visit a classic computer flea. Extra points if you can simulate disk read errors on the eleventh diskette of a failed install
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI have this exactly for my Apple //e SD card reader. Reading from an SD card makes no noise, so there’s an option to make it. It’s called the Noisy Disk Mechanical Sounder for the Floppy Emu. https://shop.bigmessowires.com/products/noisy-disk https://shop.bigmessowires.com/products/noisy-disk
- bitwize 4y agoThe TRS-80 Model 12 and 16 had 8" Tandon thinline drives that did some sick bass drops, especially on power-on/system boot. If anyone makes an emulator that replicates those golden sounds, they will have my utmost respect. The TRS-80 Model II, from which those machines were derived, had a single thicc Shugart drive that was even noisier. The solenoid that engaged the heads made a loud "thunk" when activated (and changed the size of the screen, its magnet was so powerful!).
- userbinator 4y agoI associate the sound of a HDD "clicking" to a failure, not normal operation, so when I read the title I thought it would be about the former. That said, it doesn't sound like failure, but I think it's missing the deep bass resonances that a real HDD has.
- midoridensha 4y agoThat "deep bass resonance" really depends on what kind of HDD you're talking about. Is it a modern 2.5" laptop drive, one of those even tinier 1.8" drives, a full-height 5.25" MFM drive, or one of the old 8" drives from the 80s or earlier?
- porbelm 4y agoIt's a piezo speaker without a case around it, so yeah it will sound harsh. I guess you mean the sound missing is kind of like that hollow resonance from the casing that you get in a 3,5" drive; a bit like the thock from typing on a recent MacBook Pro keyboard?
- jonhohle 4y agoAt some point there was a Mac OS (classic Mac OS in the 90s) that displayed a hard disk activity icon to the left of the Apple menu icon. I’ve looked for the name of the utility or setting off and in for years and have been unable to find any mention of it. I seem to recall seeing it on many unrelated Macs, which made me think it was a system setting, but having gone back through several system versions I’ve never been able to find it. Not quite the same as what TFM has made (which is awesome), but hearing the crunch of a hard drive and seeing that LED flash or the activity indicator blink are so pleasantly nostalgic.
- kalleboo 4y agoThe "Disk Light" CDEV was a component of early versions of Norton Utilities for Mac. We had it on our Mac Classic and it definitely conjures up a ton of nostalgia to me too!
- kn0where 4y agoThird party disk formatting utilities like Silverlining had the option to have an on-screen hard disk activity “light” like you describe.
- yreg 4y agoiStat Menus offer this for modern macOS. The disk activity is not that relevant for me, but networking is useful. When I'm waiting for something and there is no network activity I know something's fishy. https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/ https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/
- 4y ago
- felipelalli 4y agoIs that possible to make it by software without performance degradation? I'd like to install some Linux daemon that simulates an HDD sound to feel nostalgia. :-)
- shmerl 4y agoNot a clicking HDD noise, but I found this one: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/dataCenterNoiseGenerator.php https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/dataCenterNoiseGenerator.p...
- waynesonfire 4y agodoesn't sound anything like a hdd. a light is either on-off.. the sounds a hdd makes are not at all due to a binary influence.
- hackeraccount 4y agoI agree. It didn't sound quite right - it sounded like a drive going bad. Plus there's that hard drive spinning up on boot sound... I like this idea but it's not getting at my itch.
- hackeraccount 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6xXihb8hv8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6xXihb8hv8
- throwaway742 4y agoIt's also way to fast to sound right.
- anthk 4y agoHeh, on the FS-UAE Amiga Emulator you can get, by default, the faked noise from floppies and hard disks.
- amelius 4y agoThey should provide this as a separate library.
- Minor49er 4y agoI wonder if fan sounds are going to be nostalgiac to people 20 years from now
- necovek 4y agoI can't imagine us not pushing electronics to the limit: if we can get a particular level with passive cooling, you can eke out more performance with more power and active cooling. Surely we can move more towards water/liquid cooling, but there's sounds there as well. And when you are not after performance, you'll be after small size.
- boltzmann-brain 4y agoI disagree. Low power is currently the lead design principle in modern hardware, anywhere from consumer hardware to enterprise data centers. The least common denominator of a powerful personal computer - the modern gaming console (Xbox Series X or PS5) is already silent and you can't hear the fan. I can't imagine them going fanless in the next couple generations, but who knows what'll happen after that.
- necovek 4y agoWe can agree/disagree all we want, I wouldn't bet any money on either "prediction" :) I can certainly expect "consumer" devices to move towards more of a silent profile, but workstations will still keep aiming for as much performance as possible. Even today, witness MacBook Air vs Pro lines: Air arguably gets enough performance from very similar hardware, but... you get the point. And in your example of consoles, sure, but also take into account that 8k screens are also around the corner. Edit: even the two stages of development today involve reducing power in one phase, then pushing that model to the max through pushing the power envelope (eg. Nvidia RTX 3000 -> 4000, AMD Ryzen 5000 -> 7000...).
- imperialdrive 4y agoI really really love this - sooo satisfying. My first true computer was a Pentium 60. So much love for that beast.
- aembleton 4y agoEspecially being able to switch off Turbo mode with a large physical button so that you could see the cards bounce in Solitare.
- mongol 4y agoToo much hd noise = too much swapping = anxiousness.
- jrootabega 4y agoI once had a system that was not performing well or predictably. One day I kept hearing drive activity for a long stretch of time that had no right to be happening and it was really spiking my blood pressure. Turns out it was the normal bubbling noise of an open can of soda.
- lproven 4y agoOh, that is wonderful, and I can just imagine the sound. :-D
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIf we combine this with that script someone cooked up a while that beeps whenever your browser sends data to Google, and I think we're on to something.
- jawadch93 4y ago[dead]
- porbelm 4y agoGet that thing in a case with some sort of muffling to decrease the volume and reduce some of the highest frequencies, and this would be spot on.
- NextHendrix 4y agoIf you sneak "eject" into a shell script somewhere then, permissions allowing, it will suddenly open the users optical drive if they have one. This works extra well with laptop drives that are spring loaded.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoIf it's a motorised one, "eject -t" will wind it back in again. I used to use this to attract attention to a particular machine in a datacentre, before things like iLO and ridiculously bright blue LEDs.
- trippsydrippsy 4y ago
- lagrange77 4y agoAs a kid, i imaged those sounds coming from the transistors in the CPU, because i was told, that they are tiny switches.
- dusted 4y agoYeah, I remember the slight sadness I felt when I discovered that the "cool computer sound" was actually just from the hard-drive, and not radiating from the magic going on in the cyberspace inside the circuits ^_^
- BizarroLand 4y agoBut you could hear the sound of the magic going on in the cyberspace inside the circuits when you dialed into your provider with the modem speaker activated! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0
- boltzmann-brain 4y agoThanks to microphonics, you can hear the sound of the current going into transistors in the CPU and GPU even today.
- jlokier 4y agoIf you go back to before people had hard drives in their home computers, they did in fact produce quiet, high-pitched sounds depending on what the CPU was doing. You could tell when the CPU was busy and to some extent, what it was working on.
- Zardoz84 4y agoSometimes I miss the sound of a floppy drive or a hard disk from the 90's
- pacoverdi 4y agoThere you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8
- jinto36 4y agoI feel like the bearing noise in pre-fluid-dynamic-bearing drives was an essential part of the experience, that this device doesn't recreate yet. A room full of warbly, sometimes harmonizing, gentle whirring of mid-90s Quantum drives had a certain vibe. Of course then, when an individual drive got too loud or too warbly it was a pretty good pre-emptive failure sign.
- dusted 4y agoyeah, and large arrays of disks spinning just gave this awe-inspiring choir, it felt like massive computation was going on.. even though the silly block of iron basically did nothing :D
- marcodiego 4y agoI remember how noise the HD of my first pc was. I liked that. The best thing: updating a file and creating a directory sounded different. I could tell by ear what a program was doing.
- sumtechguy 4y agoWhat was also kind of cool is each manufacture had their own 'note' as it were. You could tell the diff between a maxtor or a connner.
- gwbas1c 4y agoMy work laptop is currently a dell that makes little clicking noises when it access flash. At first I wondered if it actually had a hard drive or something wrong with it, but when I did a bit of googling, I guess some flash chips make noise.
- boltzmann-brain 4y agois it coil whine, or is it the flash chip itself that makes the noise?
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoHow come no adapter exists for SSD drives that emits sound whenever a signal is sent in-out of the ssd?
- boltzmann-brain 4y agosnooping the SATA or PCIE bus would be difficult and expensive, and if there's an error, you lose data.
- whalesalad 4y agoThis reminds me of an incredible moment in my career. Circa 2010 or 2011 I was working at a small agency in LA where we could more or less all fit in one big office. My boss (the owner) and a UX contractor were whiteboarding some flows for a new project under tight deadline. It was the classic scene, scribbles all over the place, post-it note's everywhere, coffee-stained printouts stuck to the whiteboard with little magnets, etc. Eventually the commotion of their whiteboarding session became very quiet and they returned to their computers to hunker down. Our UX contractor was twiddling some magnets in his hands, clicking them together and unclicking them, while starting at his screen and chewing through the design problem. A few moments later, a pretty loud scratching noise started. Peter, the UX guy, started to start up at the white drop-panel ceiling with a concerned look, "I think there might be a rodent in the ceiling" I knew this sound almost right away, and could also tell it was coming from directly in front of him, not the ceiling. PETER! GET THE MAGNETS OFF YOUR LAPTOP! He had inadvertently stuck them to the palm rest, directly above the spinning rust drive that was still standard for this time period. The machine quickly became unstable and then stopped booting. Poor guy was in the Apple store for the rest of the day. Hilarious in hindsight, but a lot of work was lost that day. I still remember seeing poor Pete staring up quizzically at the ceiling while the entire contents of his HDD got vaporized.
- wazoox 4y agoIn the 90s, I remember the noise of the SGI Indigo2 Impact graphics, too :) It hissed and clicked when displaying complex scenes.
- lonelygirl15a 4y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5908141/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5908141/ "Sonification of network traffic flow for monitoring and situational awareness" I've seen discussions on this concept back to the 90s but haven't found one yet. I think one is in this book: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/selectedpapers/ https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/selectedpapers/