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84 points starkparker | 9 comments | | HN request time: 1.343s | source | bottom
1. 1970-01-01 ◴[] No.44538819[source]
The sound is not right. This clicker sounds like a Geiger counter ticking out of control. The HDD sound is much deeper. It should sound as if the minute hand on a clock decided to tick out of control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUvlWt9WTKA

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2. phire ◴[] No.44539103[source]
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.

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3. ryukoposting ◴[] No.44539360[source]
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.

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4. GCUMstlyHarmls ◴[] No.44539386[source]
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.

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5. mcny ◴[] No.44539443[source]
Everyone I talk to remembers it differently than I do but I absolutely hated floppies. Probably because I used them even as late as 2003 but I remember floppies as very unreliable with CRC-32 or whatever that could happen every time inserted it into the computer.

My use case? Sneaker net -- copying documents between my computer at home and the computer at an Internet cafe. I would ride my bicycle to the cyber cafe, download these PDF or plain text and read them on my computer at home. Kind of scary how little I actually remember but that's a different topic.

6. bitwize ◴[] No.44539726[source]
A lot of older hard drives made a soft "fweep fweep fweep" as the heads were actuated by a stepper motor. The "tik-tik-tik" hard drives had servomotors. Occasionally I heard the stepper-motor "fweep fweep" sound to indicate "computer is working" in media, even when said computer was too new to have like an ST506 in it.
7. rzzzt ◴[] No.44540004[source]
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.

8. HPsquared ◴[] No.44540794[source]
Time for a custom FUSE layer or kernel module! Monitor all file I/O and simulate "how would this sound?"

A nice portfolio art piece for GitHub (could even be useful for keeping an ear on virtual machines)

Come to think of it, maybe the best way is to run the whole system on a VM with a simulated HDD that includes all the delays of a real one, and sound generation. Could also do optical drives.

9. globular-toast ◴[] No.44540813[source]
I think under ideal conditions, like raw dogging with `dd`, it wouldn't make a sound. But with a filesystem, at least, there is always a slight sound, but you're right, it's would be very different to a constant seeking sound.

It makes me wonder if filesystems had recognisable sounds. I feel like I kinda knew what my hard disk was doing just based on the sound.

I also think a large part of the sound was due to the desk it sat on. The only HDDs I run now are in a NAS in a 6 disk RAID. I've had it upstairs and I can hear a thumping sound through the floor downstairs. But now it's on solid ground and all I can hear is the more high-pitched click.