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DiskClick: Ever wanted to hear old hard drive sounds
- vaylian 3y agoRelated sound: Hard drive head crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TeQpbF5wXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TeQpbF5wXc
- fatkam 3y agoI wish I could "hear" my SSD... to be able to notice unusual activity
- rzzzt 3y agoI can, through coil whine. Although it usually kicks in on high transfer rate sequential access only.
- danybittel 3y agoOk, I hate the reddit tropes and I don't like seeing them here, but... "username checks out".
- notso411 3y ago[dead]
- imiric 3y agoYou can always hook up one of these: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-clicker-v02-restores-aural-ambience-of-pre-ssd-life https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-clicker-v02-restores-a...
- fatkam 3y agonice and thanks, but a software solution would be nice
- Brajeshwar 3y agoNo, 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.
- hulitu 3y ago> I remember the Bombay heat There were some hard drives which you shall have placed in a fridge and then, before they get hot, had some chance to recover some data. With Fireball, i think, the only option was to find another drive with good electronics, of the same size, because the motor controller was destroyed.
- weinzierl 3y agoNothing beats a well worn in Commodore 1541 banging its head against the mechanical stop. That's what I was hoping for.
- ddmf 3y agoI may see if I can find a sample of an old BBC Model B floppy being accessed.
- deervo 3y agoplease do i want to grow the current list of drives
- deervo 3y agothank you guys for your words and advice i did not except this to blow up
- yieldcrv 3y agoIts 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
- NoPicklez 3y agoI 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
- MartijnBraam 3y agoThis needs an option to also play coil whine based on CPU load to be perfect
- smallmancontrov 3y agoI 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...)
- jorticka 3y agoMany times you could also feel the hard disk vibrations through the desk.
- mikercampbell 3y agoI could smell this sound
- crazygringo 3y agoNow that's got me wondering if you could replicate that through the haptic feedback component of e.g. MacBook trackpads. I assume you could in theory? While in reality, there's probably no way for user software to access that part of the hardware directly?
- reactordev 3y agoCore Haptics [0] my friend. It's been a staple for mobile game dev for a while. It also happens to work on the trackpad on macos. But please don't. I'm sure apple would probably veto the idea as well. [0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corehaptics/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corehaptics/
- yreg 3y agoOn the contrary, I doubt Apple would reject an app for this. CoreHaptics are there for unlimited use in e.g. gaming and this HDD toy app is basically the same use case as gaming. If Apple wasn't keen on it, they would limit the macOS taptic engine APIs similar to how they do on watchOS.
- reactordev 3y agoRight, they have software controls in place to prevent my trackpad buzzing for an hour straight. Good point. I’d assume Apple devs thought about how this could be abused, thought ahead, put a circuit breaker in there and said “call the api as much as you like”.
- samplatt 3y agoI 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.
- stenius 3y agoI don't know if I was that attuned to my system, but I really miss having an audible way of knowing when a process was blocked by disk access.
- throwaway3563 3y agoYup, the pause loading HIMEM.SYS was always distinctive. The blur of clicks loading Windows also got faster when switching from the loading screen to the desktop and startup items.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoThe "click of death". Sends an icy chill down the spine of any old timers who owned an Iomega Zip.
- userbinator 3y agoOr an ST3000DM001.
- hulitu 3y agoOr IBM Deathstar.
- farkanoid 3y agoI felt physical pain looking at that sequence of eleven characters.
- mips_r4300i 3y agoQuantum Fireball 3.5
- rootusrootus 3y agoI'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).
- zeeZ 3y agoSame scenario. As soon as I turned it on and heard the noise of the drives working, my all-SSD desktop PC immediately felt slower.
- jszymborski 3y agoSame thing here! Except with various 8TB drives.
- sixothree 3y agoI've got one filled with HGST drives and boy are those suckers noise. And vibrate like crazy.
- antongribok 3y agoI 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.
- EvanAnderson 3y agoOn old PCs drive activity indicator LEDs (good) or drive mechanism sounds (better) were always a great way to build an intuitive feeling for what your computer was doing. People who got into PCs in the post-SSD world have no idea how the sounds act as a window into the computer's operation. This kind of intuition goes back a long time, too. Levy's "Hackers" describes the MIT TX-0 having a CPU register connected a speaker and the hackers who programmed the machine being able to suss out how their program was doing by the sounds the machine was making. Indeed, that's closer to the "metal" of the machine than disk activity sounds. The closest thing we have today are the fans throttling-up like jet engines, but by the time that happens things have usually gone well and truly off the rails and it's just an indication of "all hell is breaking loose w/ your CPU".
- noufalibrahim 3y agoLarge quiet rooms with only platter disk sounds to interrupt the silence were experiences that I quite cherish too.
- atoav 3y agoI am all for building sonification tools. It is a long standing idea of our IT department and me to build some sort of university wide network traffic sonification tool. But today given the amounts of data and the speed involved you can only abstract it down. So the major task will be drinking from the waterhose and having something useful fall out on the other side.
- indus 3y agoPretty 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.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoHaaa, they will figure out to sell that too. Buy, “The new AI-powered disc audio based off the standard high-quality analog technology of the early hard drives, that will make your computer perform 4X better at 1/3rd the price.”
- indus 3y agoLOL.
- deervo 3y agoeven if some muti million dollar company wanted to buy this from me which i doubr i will decline this app is for the community in mind
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoI 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).
- Animats 3y agoIt seems to emulate fan noise, too!
- zilti 3y agoI always found the sound of 90s computers very cozy and soothing in a way.
- sixothree 3y agoI feel like Nullsoft Beep fits this category.
- renewiltord 3y agoThat'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.
- hartator 3y agoI was trying to do this for cpu coil. I miss hardware feedback.
- poulsbohemian 3y agoI 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.
- smarks 3y agoDoes it have an option to park the heads before shutting down?
- bitwize 3y agoI 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.
- ilaksh 3y agoAnyone 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).
- hwbunny 3y agoWhy isn't there a sound module for ssds? It's a no brainer, how come nobody came up with anything?