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.
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".