Drives that are absolutely silent. But even SSDs make noise that can be heard when the rest of the system is silent. Not all of them do that. The first few times I heard it I though there was something wrong with the laptop I was using.

I plan on getting rid of most of the old spinning rust drives at some point. Maybe I should make sound recordings of the different drives before selling them.

Most of real 1" height maxtor make a high pitched "weee" when spindle motor starts.

Cheers,

snufkin wrote on 2021-11-10, 13:08:

...which is around middle C on a piano. [...] But I don't think that's really what you're looking for.

Yes, you are right.
The sort of "sound" I was thinking of is more of imitating sounds.

In 1982 I got some fun programs for Apple II that consisted of crude line draws on the two HGR pages being flipped together with the floppy heads moving, creating their own kind of "sound".
I only remember two of these.
One a saw cutting wood, one image with saw up, one with saw down, and the drive making sawing sounds like when one uses a saw.
And the other was a hand masturbating a penis. One with hand down, one with hand up, and at orgasm time, the drive got rattling like crazy.

I and my friends all had Apple Shugart drives, clones were not yet that common back then.
But, I bet this would have sounded different on drives from other manufacturers.

Yeah, if you are going to make a cartoon about a retro computer you definitely want to use this Conner drive sound too.

+1 for Quantum Fireballs and Bigfoots

Why not torture the poor souls for your amusement:
http://hdmotion.pingerthinger.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RleSLSbewCo

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-11-10, 15:43:

Drives that are absolutely silent. But even SSDs make noise that can be heard when the rest of the system is silent. Not all of them do that. The first few times I heard it I though there was something wrong with the laptop I was using.

I plan on getting rid of most of the old spinning rust drives at some point. Maybe I should make sound recordings of the different drives before selling them.

The reason or that noise is power regulation cannot cope with the sudden increases in amperage draw and that makes the laptop in question basically incompatable/not designed with them in mind *or* its going to fail anyhow due to age.
But SSD is completely off topic

As others have previously stated, the Maxtor 7120AT. Definitely a unique seek test sound.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-11-11, 00:38:

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-11-10, 15:43:

Drives that are absolutely silent. But even SSDs make noise that can be heard when the rest of the system is silent. Not all of them do that. The first few times I heard it I though there was something wrong with the laptop I was using.

I plan on getting rid of most of the old spinning rust drives at some point. Maybe I should make sound recordings of the different drives before selling them.

The reason or that noise is power regulation cannot cope with the sudden increases in amperage draw and that makes the laptop in question basically incompatable/not designed with them in mind *or* its going to fail anyhow due to age.

Nah... These were laptops that came with SSDs. The same SSDs will make sound when installed in any system.

SSDs draw less power than HDDs. How would it even make sense that it would be power draw related?
It isn't just a quick sound that happens right when you start accessing the drive. It can be heard the whole time the drive is being accessed.

It is a high pitched ticking/clicking sound.

I always liked the sound of scsi drives doing the temp recalibration at start up, many older IDE also did it but was more subtle. Newer SATA ones you can't really hear it....

Hanamichi wrote on 2021-11-10, 18:05:

+1 for Quantum Fireballs and Bigfoots […]
Show full quote

+1 for Quantum Fireballs and Bigfoots

Why not torture the poor souls for your amusement:
http://hdmotion.pingerthinger.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RleSLSbewCo

Yeah, those Quantum fireballs drives came in HP Kayak workstations with the Seagate Cheetah SCSI drives.
The BIGFOOT drives came in HP Pavilion desktop computers.
I think Apple used the Quantum fireball too in the Macintosh Performa or some other Mac.
I knew a guy who was an employee at Quantum before they sold the company to Maxtor.

The quantum fireball 540a is in my opinion one of the greatest sounding hard drives. Has such a cool “drum roll” sound when initializing on power on

Here is a small video of random seek on my Kalok KL-343.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9HLOmm0Xdkg
The sound was way cooler when they used stepper motors instead of voice coils.

ST-251-1 start sounds pretty cool 😉

https://youtu.be/J3njFW_L08k

I will always remember an old dog from my compaq presario cds 520:

quantum maverick 270MB

The bearings was super noisy even when drive was almost brand new. Also super loud and crunchy overall.

Apart from that I love these old seagate u4 or u8 with 512 kb of cache with capacity like 8 gigs or something. Ideal for socket 7 platform with less noisy bearings but still crunchy.

A few personal picks:

- Quantum Fireball ST, SE, Bigfoot CY
- Seagate Cheetah 15K
- Seagate ST310211A u5
- Seagate ST31000340AS/NS
- ST1000DM010

Bigfoot drives. They are slow garbage, but they do sound cool.

WD Caviar - Especially the older ones under 1 GB sounds like Music for me 😀

Worst one I remember was a brand called „Kalok“ (sp?) 40 MB.

Edit: Just saw the post from Der Baum incl that Video of a Kalok making the „grinding“ noise. Thats what I am talking about 😀

BigMaQ wrote on 2024-03-16, 10:57:

Worst one I remember was a brand called „Kalok“ (sp?) 40 MB.

My KALOK sounds nice 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ3miGrj0hs

The first time I ever saw a Mac at school was also the first time I ever heard an HDD. It was a Mac SE, when they were new, and man I remember the sound it made was so cool. I asked the librarian what made that sound and she said "It's the Hypercard". Lol, anyways I don't know what type of drive that was but it was my first and favorite HDD sound.

Shagittarius wrote on 2024-03-16, 16:13:

The first time I ever saw a Mac at school was also the first time I ever heard an HDD. It was a Mac SE, when they were new, and man I remember the sound it made was so cool. I asked the librarian what made that sound and she said "It's the Hypercard". Lol, anyways I don't know what type of drive that was but it was my first and favorite HDD sound.

I know hypercard is that hypertext database doohickey, but went looking in case anyone made a hardcard for Macs they called hypercard or something similar. Nothing showed up for that, but I came across an early Mac HDD discussion on Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comment … released_apple/
which seems to indicate that it might have had a Quantum.