* past SMART errors => knock of death sound
* unrecovered errors => head crash sound
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:
- 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.
Here is a full-featured example: https://github.com/MobyGamer/softhddi
https://eoe.works/collections/shop-all-ipod-video-ipod-class...
But the immediate frequency change is enough for me to anticipate a delayed reaction. "Oh, computer is computing. Reach for coffee."
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.
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.
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.
Unlike the seeks, it's just background noise, with no useful information.
Granted, the most distinctive noise of the Vectra's boot sequence is the moaning of the floppy drives, not the hard drive.
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.
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.
But yes, they were very unreliable. I used to copy the files onto two disks because it was very common for one to not work.
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.
It's progress but I miss those clicking sounds.
My office room is now absent of both noise and heat generated by my desktop and it's so much nicer for it.
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
ST-506 startup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7ImJwSmjzs
T-53 startup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNe9T1FRhwg
Tell me those aren't the best sounds ever.
I have a lot of vintage HDDs from 20 MB MFM to several GB IDE & SCSI drives and grew up with them.
catapart•7mo ago