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
Older hard disk drives had a more melodic sound to their seeking, to my ear. My first PC with a hard disk drive had an ST-251. That had a very distinctive, almost musical sound.
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.
I believe the recommendation is to run btrfs on top of mdraid, which works fine. Meta is said to use btrfs, but apparently they don't care about the raid implementation, so there's nobody paying for that development.
OpenZFS works fine, but it can be tricky to install due to the license thing, not all distributions support it in their installer.
Bcachefs is said to be the up and coming contender for both, but it was merged to the mainline kernel in January, so probably at the moment it is tricky to install as well. I would think many of this year's distribution releases will make it available.
IMO the "next fs" is just zfs. They somewhat recently merged RAIDZ expansion feature https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/12225 and make regular improvements. If no file system has what you need today, zfs will probably be the first one to have it "tomorrow," imo.
For all the talk about the raid5/6 issues on btrfs, people don't seem motivated enough to actually spend time fixing this. It's almost as if mdadm was enough and there wasn't that much drive to make it happen.
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.
On the contrary, I doubt Apple would reject an app for this. CoreHaptics are there for unlimited use in e.g. gaming and this HDD toy app is basically the same use case as gaming.
If Apple wasn't keen on it, they would limit the macOS taptic engine APIs similar to how they do on watchOS.
Right, they have software controls in place to prevent my trackpad buzzing for an hour straight. Good point. I’d assume Apple devs thought about how this could be abused, thought ahead, put a circuit breaker in there and said “call the api as much as you like”.
Well I don't know if that's the case, but I also don't know why your trackpad should brake after buzzing for an hour straight?
Your iPhone doesn't break from buzzing for an hour straight, developers are free to call the apis as much as they like. The taptic engines in both of the devices are pretty much the same thing, no?
Although, mildly related to your point: There was a Tesla software update last year that put a cooldown on the steppers moving the seats if the user fucks around with a seat position too much. Apparently _those_ were prone to overheat and brake.
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.
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.