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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well... floppies were pretty reliable enough if you cared for them.
Meaning for those sitting on your desk or in the cabinet you bought those fancy boxes with a translucent matte covers (and keylocks, of course).
And for those you got with yourself and actually cared about the data on them to reach the destination - you didn't stay around the high energy/high voltage machinery (like a trolleybus or the engine compartment on a motorized railcars)... or just used a 5th grade knowledge and used any tin box of succinct size for your usage.
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.
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.
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.
I appreciated the video of the 5mb HDD anyways. It's astounding how far storage has come. You can get 3 million times as much storage for a 30th of the price. Old HDDs sounded so nice, though.
I have a watercooled workstation (don't ask), and one day I made it spin up the pump when the chips heat up. I believe it goes from 17% pwm to 18% whenever any chip is more than 15°C warmer than the water. Changes nothing, and you wouldn't set it up like that.
But the immediate frequency change is enough for me to anticipate a delayed reaction. "Oh, computer is computing. Reach for coffee."
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.
Not necessarily. You could do it in a similar form factor, you'd just probably need a bigger speaker and more complicated acoustic model.
Though maybe instead of keying of an HDD LED, it should sit on the IDE/SCSI bus and generate sounds based on the actual access commands. That shouldn't be impossible, since the main market would be in retro-computing, and there are already devices that emulate those disks. Instead of figuring out what block to return, it would instead figure out of how long of a seek would have been needed and play the right sound.
If someone produces something that can simulate the sound of a 20MB Miniscribe drive, I'd buy it in a heartbeat:
Im all for this. I miss the tactile feedback of older hard drives, you knew the computer was actually doing something. New computers are too quiet, like electric cars.
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 wanted to do something similar 3-5 years ago, and while I found that you could order the Taptic Engine, I couldn't find any good info for driving them last time I checked.
There was a HN submission for a project which had lots of quality sounds for different models of HDDs, but I can't find it anymore. Does anyone have a link?
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.
Is it perfect? No. But I have one of them in a Pentium 200 MHz system that I use a front-facing CF card slot as the primary means of storage, and I very much appreciate the audible feedback for disk activity. I just wish there was some mechanism to simulate more accurate sounds, but I digress.
P.S., Depending on the CF card, this machine runs Windows 9.x, Red Hat 6.2, OPENSTEP 4.0, or Apple Rhapsody DR2 hehe
Agreed with other comments that it doesn't sound quite right. There are many types of HDD seeking noises, but this one is too high pitched, too fast, and too loud.
I have a lot of vintage HDDs from 20 MB MFM to several GB IDE & SCSI drives and grew up with them.
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.
I found it worthwhile to move my desktop to another room by using long, 50ft cables (DP1.4, USB 3.0, powered USB hubs). I also have a pikvm connected to Home Assistant so I can press the power and reset buttons using a ZigBee remote. The desktop lives in a Sliger 4U chassis in a rack with my NAS, networking gear, and a UPS.
My office room is now absent of both noise and heat generated by my desktop and it's so much nicer for it.
Now I miss Nullsoft Beep which did this along with other futuristic kinda hums and etc. I assumed there would be other good implementations of the same idea but haven't found much yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUvlWt9WTKA
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