The HDD Clicker: Add Hard Drive Sounds to SD/CF/SSDs
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- Опубликовано: 2 июл 2024
- Testing out the HDD Clicker by Matze and Serdaco, a board that generates hard disk clicking noises based on HDD LED activity. No more unsettling silence on old machines running off SSD, Compact Flash, or SD card interfaces!
Here's where I bought the device: www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker
Check out the video on the project by root42: • The HDD Clicker
More info here: www.retrokits.de/index.php/hd...
00:00 The HDD Clicker
04:39 Installing It
06:41 Testing It
12:02 Modifying With Tape 
Наука
I think that the SD reads and writes so fast the clicking is way faster than what an old school spinning disk would be so that is making the clicking very rapid.
That, and the fact that it's missing the "whirring" sound that HDDs make while spinning but not necessarily reading/writing data. With a higher-quality speaker (instead of using a piezo) and some better software, this would *absolutely* be a product I'd consider putting in my modern Ryzen 7000 + 4090 PC.
@@Psythik the "whirring" sound is the spindle motor. And depending on the drives and the case they were not always audible. IBM and Connor drives were very quiet (relatively), while Quantum and Seagate (before the Connor acquisition) have that unique 90s drone sound of the motors. Obviously there were all the others, but it really depends on what kind of drive you're trying to replicate, how important it is
@@Psythik baha, I'm with ryzen 3000, and recently upgraded to a 4090, here's the kicker. I still use platters!
@@Xurikyo Jesus christ you need to get an NVME ASAP
@@Psythik tbh having a ssd is overrated.
That would honestly be great for building a modern sleeper PC in a classic case - really helps creates that immersion of it being an older machine with real power underneath!
Ooh, good point!
@@LGRBlerbs agreed 🎉
@@LGRBlerbs 😎
My current build (5800X3D/3070) I put in an early 2000s beige case, and the 4TB HDD I've got in there still makes a big racket lol.
Or in a "new" old spec retro PC, made with new parts
It's a neat idea but I would like to see a more advanced implementation on something like the RaSCSI that uses real customizable sound samples and uses the current head position as its input instead of just the activity LED. This clicker can't really tell the difference between sequential and random access so it has to approximate it.
Wouldn't something that creates mechanical sounds like a solenoid be even more suitable? At least sound wise.
Go get that implemented and send it off to LGR for review, you have a month...
Sounds like you have a project for yourself over the winter. Chop chop.
I simply prefer to keep mechanical drives in my vintage computers. No need to replicate the sound, just use the real thing.
To me, the drive was part of the experience, especially old drives that slightly vibrates the table when loading a program.
I want one that actually count the bytes passing through the cables and extrapolating that to mapping tables with every existing hard disk drive and replicating the noises exactly.
Just get a hard disk dude.
If you have a broken hard disk, open it up and remove the contents and see if the clicker will fit inside that. The speaker being exposed to the open air will not give you the same resonance as a disk stepper motor being inside a metal housing. Likewise, it being on the side of the case will also make it sound off since it's firing directly into a metal panel, but facing down inside the drive cage might be better since you often see the bottom of a stepper facing down out the bottom of a mechanical disk alongside the controller board.
it's a neat idea for sure! It's just in this configuration it sounds more like a laptop disk than a desktop disk.
Downfiring it from within the drive cages, and a little bit of foam/cotton to muffle it slightly would probably work wonders. Mounting it in an actual drive would be next-level!
First thing I thought would been a 3d printed metal housing for the speaker. Especially mentioned Caviars tend to have quite metallic click.
Except they probably recorded the drive from its exterior so putting an externally recorded HDD into an HDD case will still not sound like a proper HDD. You're just compounding the problem.
@@d3v1lsummoner It uses a Piezoelectric disk to make clicking sounds, though. IIRC it's not sample based.
@@benanderson89 In that case that's slightly better(?). Maybe some metallic resonance could do wonders, but I'm skeptical regardless. But maybe that's just my bias for having little love for the sounds of revolving rust.
I love how you mentioned the hard drive clicking sounds being relaxing, because I feel the same way. The sound of the hard drive spinning and clicking mixed in with the low, filling sounds of the fans and the high-pitched sound of the CRT was like white noise for me. Even now, when I go into the basement and fire up the Dimension 2400, I still get that warm and fuzzy feeling. And I'm only 17! But hey, that was my only desktop PC up until I was about 9 (I got a used Compaq D530 CMT that our aunt gave to us), and I was happy with it.
My first computer was a Tandy 1000 HX. Two 720K floppies, no hard drive. I've since built a custom XT-IDE solution for it, but I keep thinking I ought to ad a big clunky relay to the CF-card module so it sounds like an actual hard drive.
That's a trippy experience looking up the Dimension 2400 and finding reviews online from when it was new but hearing about the model from a retro angle lol
I think I'm getting old :'D
@@DounutCereal We’re all getting old.
Feel the same way. I'm 19 Nd remember using SGIs and Amigas in primary school. Some early windows os's as well. Recently got an a500 in the process of installing more ram on that. Tbh the sound of the floppy disks just give me anxiety, need to get a HDD installed soon hahah. Wanna do a w98 rig also. Remember my dad had a PVM back in the day as well. Was sick it was like 21", 1440p and colour correct for graphics work. Doubt I can get anything that good, might try get a Trinitron for the Amiga and my old consoles tho. Them old Sony CRTs are sick asf
@@BlackEpyon That actually would be pretty cool! It would have a more authentic, metallic sound to it.
I feel like another solution, although a bit complex, would be to take an old (preferably dead or insignificant) IDE hard drive, and use an MCU like the Arduino to control the heads.
When I was a kid we had a Pentium 133 machine that had the best sounding hard disk I've ever heard. The rest of the machine was unremarkable, it was a generic beige box surplus from the local school district, but something about it resonated just right for the 2GB hard disk to make the most wonderful bassy washboard-sounding noises. I'd run Scandisk and defrag on it just to hear the _cruncha cruncha_ sound. Hard disks really can have quite the variety of sounds!
your mom
I share the same issues as Clint. Another factor I believe is the access rate. Flash media is going to read/write much faster than period correct spinning disks and as a result the click will be equally as fast. One would conceivably have to slow down the read/write speed of the drive to obtain a more period correct clicking speed. The down side of course being a slower machine.
You can probably get a convincing experience without slowing down access speeds (for the people who want the best of both worlds).
A simple rate limiter would stop the clicks from getting too close together and having the same aprox sound experience.
It just wouldn't be a one-to-one mapping of seeks to clicks anymore.
If you accept a slower data transfer as a tradeoff, maybe just getting a new (or new old stock) spinning disk would be the way to go?
I feel the same way. When I think "mechanical hard drive", I think of opening a folder, waiting a brief second or two while the hard drive clicks away before the Explorer window finally shows up and the drive goes silent.
Hearing "period correct" said outside reenacting feels so strange. Like seeing those behind the scenes photos of Marie Antoinette (2006 film) actors holding a MacBook. I giggled just a little. 😂
Awesome idea! The only possibly off-putting aspect is that it simulates loud clickiness from like, early-90s drives without the noisy motor spinning. This really needs a metal flywheel to generate the motor sounds! And maybe volume controls.
better yet: several metal flywheels placed very close to each other, driven in parallel.
Or use the old motor from an old drive and attach the clicker and or SSD board to the underside of the drive?
Maybe just rig a hard disk to keep running even if it's not reading and writing anything itself?
First PC my family had owned was this KLH 195 we bought from Sam's. a 286 with 640k memory and a 40meg HDD. And that HDD sounded like a coffee grinder!
Those are my favorite old drives! Thumping the table during access!
This is so cool, with a volume control it would be a great addition to any retro pc.
call it the make button....ive heard some horribly noisy drives vs almost quiet drives.
This is a great idea that I've never seen before, but I think it sounds too regular in both timing and volume to sound convincing. A hard drive sounds different reading sequential data to random data, but this all kinda sounds the same to me. If they keep developing this idea, it could be amazing though!
Definitely a neat proof of concept, with more development or similar devices we could add a lot of charm back to old systems and new PCs alike
Mine just marked as shipped the other day. I'm glad you did this video, it helps ease the pain of waiting.
I ordered the version without the 3D printed case. I'm going to try putting some foam mounting tape directly over the piezo speaker hole, and see if that dampens the sound further.
It might not be the best hard drive sound emulator, but I like that your evaluation is fair to the product in question. As you say, there's only so much one can do with the very simple hardware. I'm guessing it wasn't crazy expensive. Some RUclipsrs bash on products like these, often open source projects made by a community member and made available for free. Seems like they have some crazy expectations, which isn't fair at all. Anyways.... Nice little video 😊 Have a great day all!
It's a good first idea. But lacks the lower noise the disks makes as well. This also needs some randomness so it dont always click with the led flash as the LED flashing does not always mean head movement.
I'd love to have one of these that included or mimicked the sound of old voice coil drives. That old XT/AT whine is so comforting.
Or the whirrrrrrrr of the drives as they spin up!
This is.... absolutely magnificent. I didn't know I missed this in my life! I'm ordering one for my retro-rig
Wow cool thanks for presenting the HDD Clicker my buddy developed it. I also made a video on Tiktok about the prototype a few weeks ago (unfortunately I'm very inexperienced in presentations) but your videos have a much better reach 😇🙏
Worth considering that you're actively listening to it, rather than just not thinking about it happening in the background. I think if you had one of these installed, you'd forget what it was and just get used to the reassuring noise of the drive, and the informative clicking when it was doing something and not "Is it frozen again?"
Definitely. And now that it's a wee bit muted with the tape, I've already found myself forgetting it's even there while using that machine :)
I wonder if sticking it deeper into the case to get more resonance would help in addition to the tape.
I was re-imaging 64 thin clients and I could swear I could hear mechanical drives. Just so many years expecting to hear sounds that my mind still makes them.
Edit: I also have an old first gen i3 laptop with a 5400rpm drive and I still love hearing that drive while I'm working on the budget.
As soon as I saw the title, I'd hoped this was what this was... Love it!
I'd mess with various "mufflers", cloth, etc over top... seeing if you can soften it to an exact match.
Sounds exactly like our old win 98 dell sounded like. That sent me wayyy back, haven't thought of or heard this sound in years!
It's the same problem with those Amiga floppy ones you mentioned. They sound nothing like an Amiga drive, they sold like old PC drives. Due to the Amiga's form factor, the floppy drive sounds considerably softer with less reverb, and isn't as "tinny".
I've been asking for one of these things for _years._ Glad to see it's finally a thing.
I've wanted something like this forever. I was considering looking into doing this with an arduino or something, complete with some kinda blinkenlights array, but SerdaShop beat me to it!
This sounds more like a geiger counter. As others noted, a better implementation that includes spinning and stepper motor samples would be better, and an awesome thing to have.
Simulating head movements would require more information about what's going on in the drive (i.e. access to the IDE bus rather than just the activity light)
Build it and we will buy it.
I've always liked the sound of floppy disk drives (and still do on my K6-2 system), but I remember spending a heap of cash back in the early 2000's doing everything I could to get rid of hard drive racket!
The arrival of SSD's in 2008/09 was a wondeful thing.
Yes, this is a funny novelty, but if people in the past (which could just be our younger selves) could watch this they'd probably be shouting at the screen.
I’m never getting a disk again. The whirring is fairly nice but the scratching drove me absolutely insane and makes me think it’s about to break down at any second
I pre-ordered one of these & it shipped around the end of October. Will be neat to try out!😊
Love this, and agree with your recommendations for new features!!!
Thanks Clint!
I would so like it to also do the platter spinning sound. That and the clicks would be so awesome. Wonder if someone just also replaced the piezo with a small cone speaker. So much cool potential here. Then make a HDD size case for it and... and.. and yeah a solid thing but some improvements would make it so damn super cool.
i miss the sound of my old raptors spinning up , and making the floor shake .
@@B33fSupreme Yes! Thats why I always grab a Velociraptor for any build I do. 10K rpm drives use to be a big deal. And they are great for putting EMU's and older games on.
I was thinking about this as well. Maybe plug any old spinning disk just to power for the whirring sound.
Especially on boot
Wizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Platter sound is very nostalgic, both winding up and winding down. I still have an HDD backup drive that powers up whenever it's accessed, then some time later you can hear it cut out as it powers off again.
I’ve always wondered about an option like this and whether there was ever interest. I love the idea as it helps complete the experience (for those who want more than silence from all but the power supply fan). However, I wonder if a taptic engine would feel more authentic, mimicking the deeper “thumping” sound that seeking on older drives would give you. I think the vibration from that would feel very convincing.
I think this is a great start.
That would be a perfect idea for old drives from the 80s! The 20mb Seagate I have in my IBM will vibrate the whole desk the entire time its running. And if you run Norton's disk check, one of the tests really gives it a workout, and will even start shaking the whole desk a bit!
Akin to driving a car. You feel just as much as you hear.
Big clunky relay.
Three minutes in, I feel like I understand the audio aesthetics of a hard disk sound of an nice early 90's PC. For nostalgia, this has value.
Yeah, hearing that sound immediately threw me back to middle school in our school's computer lab where all you could hear was clicking from all the banks of computers. It also reminded me of when I was in high school and sometimes left my computer on overnight, just seeing the LED flashing and hearing the clicking from across the room without being close enough to hear the other motor and spinning sounds that this doesn't emulate.
Love all these vids coming out… wish it was daily 😜
If there was a slightly larger transducer and lowered volume, it would work quite well (seems to lack that lower-frequency resonance that an arm/platter makes). Neat idea to run it off the HDD LED. Maybe have a programmable setting for the click to sound on every second or third flash? Different sounds? This could be a fun little thing.
I like the idea of this and when further developed it could be great
Id love to see a take on this for iPod flash mods because feeling and hearing that whizzing and ticking is unlike anything we have nowadays- but using original drives poses all the risks and more pc hdds do
This clicker is a nice and simple way to get something similar to that old drive sound.
A cheap stepper motor and driver connected to the activity signal might also work to make the right type of sound.
I was thinking about a device like this for a while and glad there finally is one
I personally like a little more bass tone. Deeper crunching sounds. But this is an amazing idea.
I second the need for "Randomized" clicks. You really only hear that click sound when the head has to move far. If the drive is reading/writing several nearby tracks, the head barely moves. IE: If you format or wipe a disk, you won't hear the click as much because even though the drive is pretty much working at 100%. That's because the head is just gradually moving from one track to the next as it writes 0's over the entire disk.
I just fired up this old 486dx2-66 at the office (found in a back room, made a couple videos about it, but I digress), and you are 100% correct: the drive has various sounds it makes during usage. Some clicks are loud and repetitive like the adapter you got. But, many are more subtle, like a very light tapping as opposed to the clicking (and no I do not mean head crash sounds). But even while continuously running, the pitch, volume, and "speed" of the clicking varies greatly. The adapter is a fun first-run go at it, for sure, but two papers later and we'll have something special. It's still very cool. What a time to be alive! (heh-heh, to borrow the phrasing of another youtuber).
i love this idea, the old drones and clicks from my families old quantum fireball drive that was in an old HP are deeply nostalgic to me
A good rev 0 version. I’m assuming the power LED connection is for if there is some sort of hard drive spin-up sound implementation. Would really love to get this project to the point where you could emulate specific hard drive sounds. Like, if I could get this to sound 100% faithful to a Seagate ST-225 even with spinning sounds I’d be so sold. For now it’s interesting, but has a long ways to go before I’d really consider it a must-have. Then again literally all of my systems have mechanical hard drives already, so I’m not the target market….until they inevitably start failing.
The difference is, with a physical disk there's a lower and physical 'clunk' noise each time the head moves and stops abruptly, that resonates through the case, as well as the actual head clicky noise... I think that's what's missing tbh!
It definitely reminds me of a very old PC. I was a child but I do remember the DOS and Windows 3.11 times and the sound of the box really made me smile :D
That's the LAST thing I'd want for my SSD's. Still, cool that someone created it! Keep the awesome content coming, man! Your channel is my FAVORITE one on the tube! I salute you, and wish I could shake your hand! I will say this, though: the clicks sound like they were generated via auto-tune.
It would be neat to be able to change the volume and have it sounding more mechanical (and some way for it to imitate the sound changes as if it's reading different platters/tracks. ) Also, it may be a nice touch for the cables to reach the back so it can be mounted to look like a tadiran battery stuck to the inside backing.
If this is designed with more emulation I'd be careful though because having too much going on in its processing could possibly make it lag a bit more and not be in sync with the LED.
BMoW actually does something similar for the Floppy EMU that uses a relay to make it more "mechanical sounding": ruclips.net/video/VGEMGFMK2dI/видео.html
Unfortunately, that doesn't really sound "right" either.
> imitate the sound changes as if it's reading different platters/tracks
Have you ever heard a hard drive before? Or know how they operate?
@@Those_Weirdos I am referring to how a hard drive has different pitches (or whatever it's called) while reading/writing.
Agreed - A circuit to randomize & or ramp up/down the intensity/volume of the clicks after an also random number of pulses would go a long way to imitate the travel & position of the heads in a mechanical drive. Idk if that would be simple or not in such a small package...
This would be a cool feature for a SSD adapter board; SCSI or IDE on one end, SATA on the other, and a microcontroller with a speaker in the middle. That way the microcontroller could emulate drive noises as it emulates the older disk protocol.
That would be awesome! You could even add the option to emulate the speed of a mechanical hard drive, since after all the device is facilitating the data transfers. The amount of customization that a device like that could have is really cool to think about.
Of all your oddwares i've seen, this take the cake 🙂
Sounds like the IBM SCSI hard drive in an AMD K6-2-333 build I did. The thing I love about the IBM SCSI drive is that the drive doesn't spin up when the computer is powered on. The SCSI controller sends the stat signal to the drive when the SCSI controller is initializing during POST so it has a very interesting sound of the drive coming up and initializing. The clicking is very loud and sounds a lot like that clicker you have.
This makes me think about the fake engine noises that get pumped into a lot of new cars these days
I'd try opening it up and filling the actual thing with something that dampens sound like acoustic foam.
Also I think it would be interesting to try writing some software to control it, and linking it to Window's hard drive usage levels with added randomness. The only downside would be no clicking on boot.
Maybe you could make it respond like this one does by default until the program takes control, that way you could have clicks on startup, and more accurate ones after boot.
That was my thinking, somehow dampen it. I remember old hard drives clicking but they had a lower sound. Its -very- close, and with some minor adjustments I think it could be very convincing.
I had a laptop that had a very distinctive hard drive sound. It was a newer laptop, windows XP, but it had the feature of turning off the hard disc when it didn't need it, so I have very vivid memories of this whirr as it spun up, and a very unique click as the head, presumably, came out of park.
They did a pretty good job
You were looking for one that sounded like the drive was waiding through sand! 😄
HDD activity sounds were a great way to know that a computer was doing something. I hate that every single activity led and sound is removed from modern laptops for example.
Same with physical media, i knew exactly when my game was loading or not by hearing the disc spin up to 56x ! amazing at the time.
I don't mind being without it
That's what Task Manager > Performance tab is for. Well, on W10 and later. Not sure about Vista/W7 and earlier.
@@CnCDune The modern task manager was added in Windows 8
It's a bit like how error messages have been totally forgotten by most programmers. Usually nowadays an app will just freeze and disappear. I feel like there used to be more descriptive error messages back before macs taught users to not expect anything at all and have the thing serviced for every little thing that shows up.
Maybe I'm misremembering things. But, dangit. I just want to know what the darned thing tried to do when it crashed. "Playback error" tells me nothing. What made the player throw an error doggonnit?!?!
Seems more useful if there was a layer of hardware emulation, like what you'd have with disc images, so it'd have information for what physical location it was suppose to be in to give appropriate sound.
Nostalgia is a good drug. Kthx for the clicks.
Just seeing the title of this video in my stream made me smile. But still, one needs to have a strong case of nostalgia to want this.
It's a difficult task as hard drives vary a lot. Some are quite quiet. Also, old pc's would also be more noticeable because they had so little fan noise due to very few, and very small, fans.
As far as I remember, one particular drive could make different noises depending on what it was doing as well
@@somitomi Ya, they could make different sounds and have different tones. When running defrag, for example it would seem like you could almost tell the difference between the "read" sound and the "write" sound as it was shuffling the data. I dunno if it was a mind trick, but it sometimes seemed like that's how it was.
Although, from memory, it wasn't as extreme as floppies that made all kinds of different noises under normal operation.
It'd be cooler if the little microcontroller could do a _very_ basic interface with IDE to control a sacrificial HDD. That way you could swap out the "sound" easily. You'd also get that really great spin up sound on old Matrox drives.
The drive would need to be functional to begin with for that to work though, and not like vintage hard drives are known to last very long. At that point if you have a working vintage drive why not just use it and get the real experience
@@startedtech you could use a drive that has data issues but the mechanics still work. And there would still be reasons to use a CF or SD card, namely convenience and speed.
That defrag sound reminds me of evenings on our family win98 just watching the defrag go for hours. The sound was part of the experience.
Love this! Definitely going to get one. I miss HDD sound not even for "authenticity" but for audible indication of HDD activity. I used to know my PC's "voice" and could tell whether it was stuck or kept doing something, especially during certain program updates or installs. I could even tell which program was being started during Windows startup by their HDD sound pattern. And could tell if Windows really finished loading up when HDD cricket noise would significantly slow down. Very useful!
They need to put this in a kit to convert standard 2.5 HDD's to Flash Card.
I would like to have those spinning and clicking sounds for my SSD and SD cards! This would be cool for modern gaming PCs that have big SSD drives!
wow man, that just really brings me back to being in the basement of my parents' house on the Windows 95 gateway. Even if the sound is a bit fast, the nostalgia is there.
I bought one of these (along with a DreamBlaster S2), can't wait to try it out 🙂
A neat project might be to use old, dead hard disks and modify them to do the same by disabling the platter so it no longer spins and using the actuator arm in place of the piezo speaker? I imagine the sound of the spinning disk whine would be easier to emulate with a speaker if desired too.
The con is those old dead hard disks are going to take up a whole 3.5" bay that you could fit several SSDs or other hardware in instead.
u can hook up the coil of the 'head' to the speaker output of about any amp and it will make noise vibrating. now i want to try this as well. i also have a little 3w 5V DC amplifier. u can buy those for $1 for 3.
@@chatboss000 ...several SSDs? Why would you have several SSDs mounted in a vintage PC lol.
@@startedtech RAID0 for even more speed, of course /s
@@startedtech Who said it was a vintage PC?
Hi Clint, wow thanks for showing off the Clicker. To reduce the volume, place some tape directly on the speaker, instead of on the case. I added this information now to the product page.
Really neat looking product there!
I am actually quite happy that PCs and quiet these days though those old school HDD sounds definitely bring back child hood memories
Oh hell yeah, you got it in! NICE!!!!
For something where the activity LED pulses are slow enough, like on an XT-IDE adapter, you can get pretty much the same sound by simply replacing the adapter's LED with a piezo speaker, no extra electronics needed.
For anything faster (I tried a CF to IDE adapter in a Pentium) the LED flash frequency is too high and you get squeaky beepy noises instead of clicks; a project like this makes a lot of sense there. And yes, I do miss audible activity indication on modern hardware - current laptops don't even have an activity LED anymore...
squeaky beepy noises sounds about right for some of the earlier harddrives. you know, those that didn't go "krrr krrr krrrrrk" but "booo booo booop"
@@silkwesir1444 Haha, yes, the ones with stepping motors (i.e. mostly the MFM/XTA era) made lovely "robot arm motion" seeking sounds. But the piezo I tried to drive from a fast IDE HDD's indicator sounded more like interference from a malfunctioning power supply, very unpleasant.
I wonder...could it be possible to link an actual HDD and make it spin/read randomly in sync with the actual ssd? Maybe making a custom hdd controller, kinda like the stuff you see the Floppotron doing... Just random ideas.
You can, and some people have.
Losing the drive activity noise was the worst thing about getting an SSD for me. I used the noise to gauge what was going on, if Windows or some random program was accessing the drive in the background or if the program I was using was loading or frozen, and it was so helpful. Missed the sound for years and years and years. Currently have some Seagate Ironwolf drives and good god they're so loud they lowly vibrate the entire case; extremely bothersome.
That clicker still sounds worse though; way too loud for the Seagate Barracuda drives I grew up with.
awesome idea to keep that retro feeling ;D
If the routine/circuit that generates the individual clicks could be modified to randomize the pitch of each click between a preset upper and lower limit, I think that alone would make it sound MUCH more like a real hard drive!
If they have something like this for nvme i'm down... Due to my visual impairment, flash is my biggest enemie due to its silent nature. Having auditive feedback would be awsome.
It works for anything with a hard drive LED! So as long as your motherboard sends disk activity out to the LED on your case, then this can be used :)
I almost feel this could be implemented in software... I've never heard of anything like it but reading disk read/write activity in modern day Windows is surely reasonably simple and could be fed into some software that could emulate an HDD sound.
I could not help but smile when you showed the LED and the clicking.. At least its not like a seagate drive!! I agree about the randomness but I am sure that will be Version 2
Thanks for the shoutout! It's a cute little gadget, for sure!
Thank you for sharing, word really spread around quickly after your video! Just a fun little thing that brings a smile :)
This is amazing. With what my speakers are producing from your video, the click itself is not 100% accurate as you mentioned, but tbh, it's pretty close. For me, it is the pattern that really hit home. Clicking during boot was pretty close to what I remember, but when it started clicking as you went through the start menu I felt like I was on my 486 DX2 again. Time for another LGR ASMR video? :D
It's always time for an LGR ASMR video :p
Yay! More clicking!
"Why would you want to bring back hard disk noises?"
Well, nostalgia for one. But also because sights, smells, and sounds often carry with them memories and emotions and such. For me, hearing the spin-up and track 0 seeks as well as the random head movement/servo noises brings me back to my days of just learning to use PCs, learning DOS commands and how to find their various switches to do different things, learning the BIOS, all that. Those were incredibly fun and fascinating times for me and it's nice to feel that again once in awhile by being reminded of it.
While I'm wishing for my PC to be quiet, you wish for it to be loud............that's why I watch this channel! 😆
This, sir, goes BEYOND THE PALE. The nostalgia shark has been thoroughly jumped.
Why??????
Because!!!!!!
@@LGRBlerbs yeah… you tell him Clint 👍
Why not? lmao
What a cool concept! I was just noticing how much I was missing very loud drives. When I first boot a retro computer to test it and the drive wirrrs vs when it is finally restored and is utterly silent... feels almost too lifeless? Strange to thank that I wish for my old annoying sounds to return.
I was like it sounds normal to me then I realized it has an sdcard, It is close enough for me, lol. Thanks for the video Clint
It may not sound EXACTLY like a HDD, but it does bring back memories of PCs from back in the day.
A daskeyboard 3 and a MX518; what a fantastic combo!
I have an old caviar IDE drive and man it sounds so good.
I think the connection that goes to the power led is so you can restore an HDD activity light to a case that doesn't have one.
My last tower had a WD Raptor 10K RPM drive with a plexi cover instead of metal (supposed to be shown off in a side window, I think?) and this noisy little clicker at first sounded just like that drive - Loading up XP/7 sounded like making popcorn in my case! I've got a 5tb firecuda in the power supply basement of my case for the obnoxiously large games (with a cache SSD) and you barely hear it because it's buried. One of these little beauties would definitely bring back some retro love.
Ever sense I switched to SSD I never looked back, but I still love the nostalgia from hearing an old HDD clicking away as it reads data.
The ol clicky sound. Interesting. I don't think I'll ever forget those noises.
Every time I see the viewsonic graphic series crt I get so jealous, it looks so good. But the hard drive sound is a great idea.
This kind of reminds me of the clicker you can get with the Apple Floppy Emu from Big Mess o' Wires. In its case I think it's just a relay that opens and closes every time it sees data moving along the ribbon cable.
Blu tack changes the acoustics and dulls the harsh edges of those piezo sounders. I use it at work to deaden high pitched fault buzzers when testing some of our kit in an open office
This is exactly what I’ve wanted for my vintage Macintosh machines with ZuluSCSI. Not hearing the drive crunching away doesn’t seem right.
I'm always 10 years behind current tech (save a bundle of $$) and I've noticed that the 2012-era 500GB+ HDDs all went pretty silent. Only the older 160-240GB drives from the 2000s were still clicky. I slowly have adjusted to the lack of noise and don't really miss it.
The next edition has to replicate the motor sound as well. Always loved hearing my first big ol 20MB Seagate MFM roaring to life every morning.
Music to my ears
It would probably be a bit expensive to have an accurate disk drive sound maker. The best option would probably be one that plays random seek sound files on access while continually looping the spindle motor sound when idle. You could have an option to choose samples for multiple drive models. For the true retro experience you'll want a spin-up sound at power-up and, if applicable, a timer to play loops for thermal recal cycles (especially noticeable on
I spent much of my childhood with an Amstrad PC1512, specifically the fancier model with the CGA monitor and the 20MB hard drive. That drive had a whistle-like sound when seeking that I have fond memories of. It wasn't the fastest computer (we also had a faster machine at home) but if I wanted to play some games or mess around in PaintBrush for a few hours without being bothered by my brothers, it was sufficient