The Lamp Room

Modern drives with their silent hydrodynamic bearings and almost inaudible seeking are boring!

https://youtu.be/tWd2feq9MJw

I like the sound of old Hard Drives. I have an ancient Maxtor drive that makes a similar noise.

Some old motors have nice sounds when they spin up. Similar to this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP11uySF9rM

It's amazing how quiet modern drives are tbh. I have a 4tb and a 6tb WD Blue drives in my little Shuttle Media PC and I can't hear them spinning even when I put my ear to the chassis!
That old 10gb Fireball is louder than my gaming pc when all the fans are reving up!

Yeah, most drives are very quiet now.

I have had a few hard drive that were noisy such as a Seagate. It made a high pitched noise. Not sure what caused it, I think maybe coil whine from the motor if that's possible. I also have a WD drive that for some reason vibrated quite a bit and it caused the whole case to rattle.

I still use a couple of old computers from the 1980s and love the sounds of the 5.25" 20 and 30 megabyte MFM drives in action.
Think of data transfer speeds measured in kilobytes per second and don't forget to 'park' the drive before powering down.

I remember those big full height 5 inch drives!

Okay....time to get a video of my of tower put together then!

Drives are all from the 90s, so prior to the silent era (newest is a Samsung from 1999). The two standouts though are the IBM DORS-32160 (2.1Gb, 1996) which does a passable impression of the starship Enterprise while spinning up, and a Micropolis 1598MD (1.2Gb, 1991) which while quiet when idle and startup, makes the floor shake while seeking.

Have an old 40mb Fujitsu with possibly the most epic sounding spindle motor I've ever come across, sadly it has a proprietary interface so unless I manage to track down another Toshiba T3200 portable I have no way to actually interface with it.

Sounds good!