I 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.
On 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".
I 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.
Growing up with those beige deeping beasts I always remember the activity indicators going wild. They also seemed to make more noise during HDD activity.
The drive mechanism sounds were they just louder back then or? You can put a HDD in a PC and it won't make the same grinding noises the old ones used to
After 17 years of existance one would assume they have fixed all major flaws. Anyone knows why raid is still broken on btrfs? And what is the next fs after zfs and btrfs? There should be a major contender by now, but I see none.
Haaa, 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.”
I'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).
I 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).
I 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...)
I 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.
Core 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.
Back in the day I had an AST 386 with a Miniscribe full height 40MB drive. When it was being accessed steadily, you could actually see the desk shaking. It wasn't as bad on my earlier computer that only had a half-height ST225.
Anyone 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).
I 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
I 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.
That'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.
this was my inspiration i was going to get this but my power supply doesn't have a Molex and saw there was no alternate software variant so i decided to make this
No, 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.
I 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.
Yup, 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.
I 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.
On 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".
I 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.
Growing up with those beige deeping beasts I always remember the activity indicators going wild. They also seemed to make more noise during HDD activity.
The drive mechanism sounds were they just louder back then or? You can put a HDD in a PC and it won't make the same grinding noises the old ones used to
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Large quiet rooms with only platter disk sounds to interrupt the silence were experiences that I quite cherish too.
Yep, fan speed up is the only time I now think "wtf is my computer doing right now?" when I feel it was a common feeling before.
As lovely as 3x20TB RAID sounds, RAID on btrfs is never a particularly good idea. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/btrfs#Multi-device_file_sys...
Don't overdramatize, the link doesn't suppport "never". RAID 5 or 6 is not a good idea.
RAID 1 or 0 is just as a good idea as ever.
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While BTRFS' RAID has issue, BTRFS on RAID can be done.
I do something like this, https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/What_was_the_RAID...
Basically, mdadm, then on top, format with BTRFS
After 17 years of existance one would assume they have fixed all major flaws. Anyone knows why raid is still broken on btrfs? And what is the next fs after zfs and btrfs? There should be a major contender by now, but I see none.
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Raid 5/6 should not be used. Other levels work just fine. This is not a raid-in-general problem.
Pretty 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.
Haaa, 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.”
LOL.
even 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
I'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).
Same scenario. As soon as I turned it on and heard the noise of the drives working, my all-SSD desktop PC immediately felt slower.
Same thing here! Except with various 8TB drives.
I've got one filled with HGST drives and boy are those suckers noise. And vibrate like crazy.
The "click of death". Sends an icy chill down the spine of any old timers who owned an Iomega Zip.
Or an ST3000DM001.
I felt physical pain looking at that sequence of eleven characters.
Quantum Fireball 3.5
Or IBM Deathstar.
I 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).
This needs an option to also play coil whine based on CPU load to be perfect
Or a slider to adjust how fragmented the data was on the drive being read from
Just buy an Nvidia 3080, you'll get plenty of coil whine... much to my dismay
i will look into this
I 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...)
I 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.
Many times you could also feel the hard disk vibrations through the desk.
Now 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?
Core 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/
5 replies →
Back in the day I had an AST 386 with a Miniscribe full height 40MB drive. When it was being accessed steadily, you could actually see the desk shaking. It wasn't as bad on my earlier computer that only had a half-height ST225.
Could?
I've got a NAS with five HDDs on my desk right now, you bet I can feel that when it goes thrashing.
And hear them amplified through the sides of your "mini tower" case.
I could smell this sound
Anyone 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).
I 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
I always found the sound of 90s computers very cozy and soothing in a way.
I 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.
Related sound: Hard drive head crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TeQpbF5wXc
Does it have an option to park the heads before shutting down?
That'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.
Its 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
Nothing beats a well worn in Commodore 1541 banging its head against the mechanical stop. That's what I was hoping for.
Why isn't there a sound module for ssds? It's a no brainer, how come nobody came up with anything?
There is! https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker
this was my inspiration i was going to get this but my power supply doesn't have a Molex and saw there was no alternate software variant so i decided to make this
It seems to emulate fan noise, too!
The drive ambiance checkmark is pretty much just generalized computer fan whooshing sounds
Haha
I wish I could "hear" my SSD... to be able to notice unusual activity
You can always hook up one of these: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-clicker-v02-restores-a...
nice and thanks, but a software solution would be nice
I can, through coil whine. Although it usually kicks in on high transfer rate sequential access only.
Ok, I hate the reddit tropes and I don't like seeing them here, but... "username checks out".
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I may see if I can find a sample of an old BBC Model B floppy being accessed.
please do i want to grow the current list of drives
No, 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.
> 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.
I was trying to do this for cpu coil. I miss hardware feedback.
I feel like Nullsoft Beep fits this category.
thank you guys for your words and advice i did not except this to blow up
I 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.
Yup, 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.
I 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.