Comment by colincooke
1 month ago
Oh man, this reminds me of my "party trick" back in the day of saying I could tell what OS a computer was running by listening to the HDD seeking. The good old days
1 month ago
Oh man, this reminds me of my "party trick" back in the day of saying I could tell what OS a computer was running by listening to the HDD seeking. The good old days
You can't just drop this without examples. What OSes and what were their tells?
Not that poster but I can also tell the difference in sound between filesystems, likely due to how they store their metadata and the resulting seek patterns. This is my subjective experience:
Linux ext* series - mostly silent, but even periods of high disk usage tend to be on the quieter side - probably due to lots of caching
MacOS - continuous, low-pitched "gritty" sound
Windows FAT - periods of silence punctuated by occasional intermittent groans
Windows NTFS - low rhythmic grunting, more continuous than FAT
Windows 9x - rather quiet, although periods of heavy activity can produce quite high-pitched seeking sounds
It's not something that can be easily written out in text form. More like a pronounced version of how an iPhone feels when you're force rebooting.
Not an iPhone person, however when I force shutdown a laptop I am hacking away on, I do feel like I am strangling it with a pillow to ease it's suffering. But that feeling comes purely from my side, the machine shows no signs of life at that point anyway.
Are you referring to something like the GPRS staccato coming from speakers catching a cell phone call or the almost imperceptible flyback whine of a CRT?