uummmm ... hear all that 5400 RPM magic 🤤........... I have several WD800 (7200 RPM) that I bought through the years.. the oldest one is from Nov-5-2001 🙂......... I use them for backup my CD colección.. then my DVD collection.. and now I store some eventual ISO CD's or DVD's of the few offline software that you can get and use this days😕........... the one with more hour of work is in my PC Pentium III since 2005 maybe🤔.. 50895 hours.. almost 6 years of constant running 😳.... and only 45 relocated sectors 😏... good Hard Drive... good Hard Drive😏.. don't believe me.. you can get them for peanuts.... are everywhere.... because people still have them.... and put them to sale because they still work 🧐...
The truest test of "is my audience on the same wavelength as me?", has to be to put out a neigh 20 minute video of nothing but hard drive noises, and see how it does.. great work Clint, inspired video my dude
I used to work for Quantum driving a fork lift in their warehouse. Boxes of drives would routinely get knocked off the shelves and fall 30-40ft. Management told us if you couldn't see damage to the outside of the box then it was fine to ship. My belated apologies to everyone who I caused to lose data.
I used to work doing Quantum RMA's in Canada so you kept me employed. Then I went on to work in data recovery, even better for business! So thanks! Bigfoots were the worst!
@@JohnnyTorontoEh as the only IT guy in the warehouse, it hurt sending those out, glad you at least had an upside. I suppose I did too as I was just out of college and that let me put a major tech company on my resume as a starter job.
These HDD sounds, a floppy drive reading a broken disk and a dot matrix printer working far away in the background are like a lullabies for everyone over 30...
It's cool how computers can be quiet these days, but I just miss times when it was late in the night, the CRT was glowing into your face and all you heard was the computer running and drives spinning
Yes, taken for granted at the time. I agree I do kinda miss miss it but I guess nothing stays the same for ever and those M.2 drives are blazing fast, low power as well
Those halcyon days when computers were real machines you had to know how to use, not just out of the box, RGB festooned toys for people to play Fortnite on.
If I could use an MFM drive/controller in my gaming rig just for document storage (40MB drive?) just to hear the whirr/POST clatter/sync it'd be worth it. My God someone make an adapter for PCI-E for an ISA card!
I still have a Quantum Bigfoot in my original HP Pavilion from 1996. Nothing quite as soothing as that continuous, high-pitch hum and the deafening silence when it finally shut down.
I had a TX 4gb in a HP Pavilion that one day decided to go klunk klunk klunk klunk and spun down, after that it refused to boot Windows 98SE. HP replaced it with a 20GB 40GV IBM glass platter Deskstar that also died in a short time.
I remember when, back in the 90ies, I was able to recognize the manufacturer of a hard drive just by the noises it made, without having to see the disk drive itself. Units from each maker had a very distinctive "noise profile" made by the sound of the spindle motor (especially at startup as the motor's soft starter circuit kicks in), the initial head calibration sequence and the timbre of the head actuator during the seeking. I was so obsessed with hard drives (and still I am) that after collecting them for years now I probably have a couple of hundreds of units in my collection.
I could do the same, and Samsung drives at the time ironically had a high failure rate. So whenever anyone brought a machine into the depot with hard drive symptoms, I powered it on and if I heard a Samsung I knew that was the likely culprit.
@@Caleb-fv5fp Uuuh, difficult question as I liked almost all of them, each brand made very unique and recognizable noises. For example I remember Fujitsu drives had a very peculiar noise, like a bird nervously chirping inside your computer :-D
Multiply this audio by ten, and it sounds like the LAN parties from when I was young and everyone copied everything from each-other. Those were the days!
@@SquintyGears Yes, but a genuine native long loop is a lot easier to deal with. The dead air of the loop Function as it starts again is a total buzzkill
I never saw one of those. But having taken hard drives apart, I've noticed they're much shinier than any mirror, flawless too. So I'd be amazed if you could even tell that they were spinning! Or were they over the heads? That twitched so fast you wouldn't be able to see them move either!
Imagine once upon a time being told that you had absolutely no excuse to need to drive as big as five gigs? Nowadays people complain about one terabyte being too small
Finally, the type of content I was subscribed for. Thank you. (I love all of your content.) The "Soothing Sounds of the IBM PC AT" video was always with me during lockdown. :) Time to continue the habit...
This is exactly the content I crave. What's funny to me is that this whole channel feels like a offshoot of that one mechanical switch video you accidentally put up on your main channel that wasn't meant to be public I think I'll go pull that one up, too.
In my old dumpster diving for PC parts days I liked these a lot just because they had an LED on them and my other harddrives didn't lol. As an IT helper for my high school I would also sneakily install one of these dumpster dived hard drives in a school computer right before the school day started (They trusted me with a key to the computer room), and I'd background some downloads and fill it up with games, MP3s and at the time fancy new DivX movies on their at the time impressive DSL (me having only 56k at home), and then take the drive back home at the end of the day.
I had stacks of hard drives like these, so many random 3com network cards, old Sound blasters and so much random old RAM in those days lol. Being a broke teen and asking schools, municipal government and universities if you can go through their tech trash gave me so much fun junk
@@kerbolax i rarely found anything where i lived as a teenager, but my uni emptied out an old computer lab at some point after the last guy who worked there retired. it was amazing, while the junk was waiting to be picked up for recycling, (having asked for permission) i went through it all and walked home multiple times with as much as i could carry. no one else in the building seemed to be interested.
Thank you! It may sound strange, but just hearing this brings back so many memories to me. Sitting at my desk in a server room (my first "real tech job") 3 feet away from a rack full of these, making sure customers websites stayed up and running.
Now all someone needs to do is when the first quantum computer comes out have these be one of the hard drives for it 🤣 It's a strangely soothing sound.
Quantum computers are already out and many companies are selling, using, and renting them. They're just not for consumers because the physical requirements for housing and running one are pretty intense. You can rent time to run code on quantum computers from Microsoft and others. Microsoft even developed a coding language for quantum computers called Q#.
This is great! More of these please! Let's not forget the sounds of past computer lab life! LOL We need a sound library of old computer equipment like this to run as background noise! :)
My father had been one of the first devs in my area, back in the day. His studio was next the bedrooms of mine and my brother's, he used to work late at night, and we feel asleep with the sound of him typing on his old Model M (I still have it, and I used that until a couple of years ago, now it needs some overhaul) and all the sounds from his old PC, like the hard drives and the whirling fans. This video reminded me those days, when my brother and I couldn't sleep without the soothing sounds of our father's work. Miss him everyday
these aren't even loud... these were considered quiet when they were new, compared to the monsters of the 80s, but compared to modern drives post 2015-ish, yeah they're very loud
One forgets how loud these things could be. I calibrated the volume with the sound of your mouse clicks to mine, and boy oh boy has technology progressed since then!
@@Vein1986 more of a sidegrade. They're faster but they can be less stable and reliable long-term. Just because you can't see the moving parts doesn't mean there are no moving parts. Finally, they've basically given modern software devs a blank check to write all the buggy, sh*tty, unoptimized code they want because they can lean on everyone having a fast SSD, which will inevitably lead to the same bloat and choked, slow performance they were supposed to "free" us from the HDD. Within this decade you're going to see consumer machines that take as long to boot and warm up as 90s machines just because of that issue.
I've always been fascinated by the big foot's form factor. I don't know the story of why they made those slim 5.25" drives when every other manufacturer had settled on the 3.5" bay. Loving how they have their own soldered on activity LEDs. Thanks for making them visible in this video!
I know the early Bigfoot drives had a bad reputation, but in my experience the later ones are perfectly fine. And if it's lasted this long, it'll probably outlast that 3.5" drive, due to the lower data density of the 5.25" drive platters.
Unfortunately Scandisk doing a thorough check came back with plenty of bad sectors and other errors. You can also hear the mechanism struggling later on in the vid, and sometimes it even refuses to read at all on first boot with some loud head knocking noises, so it was worth backing things up and moving onto another drive. The Fireball is only temporary for a future project, it's all backed up elsewhere when that inevitably fails too. I'm going to keep this Bigfoot going until it fully dies though :)
Hey Vwestlife. If you ever are interested in a modern high capacity and high endurance drive check out the WD Gold HDD Series. They are really quite fast for a HDD as well. Downside (or upside to me), they produce more noise than other modern 3.5 inch HDD. Sidenote, is this the one you did a thrift video on with the little see through window?
@@LGRBlerbs I've still got three different bigfoot drives that last time I fired them up were still going strong, guess I should spin them up sometime and see how they are holding up, all from back when 4GB was alot of HDD space to fill.
This reminds me of working in server rooms in the late 90’s early 2000’s before they were called data centers. Every server a tower, no rack-mounts to be seen. Everything spun at 5400rpm; HDD’s, fans, air-cons. Everything at 120dB.
Back in the 90s when I worked for a Packard Bell repair depot, I used to be able to tell the hard drive manufacturer just by the sound of their spin up and seek noises. I both miss and don't miss those days. As great as these sounds might be, after years of three 10k SCSI hard drives being 6 feet away from my head while I slept, I don't really miss it that much. Call me crazy :D
OMG Windows 95 running a defrag. This takes me back to my early teen years and I get instant flashbacks of great Duke 3D, Worms, Command & Conquer and Quake memories. I'm going to go back and listen to a commenter's AT sounds because then I'll be back to my childhood remembering beautiful DOS machines with big fat bezels and 5 1/2 inch floppies playing Shadow Caster, Dune II, AlleyCat, Mig-29 Fullcrum, Chuck Yeagers Air Combat, Indianapolis 500 and endless QBasic games. Thank you all for these sounds!
1st 30 seconds, soothing sounds of sweet dreams, 11m55s in, the sounds of my nightmares and many of panic induce wakeups and sleepless nights before school.
as a teen, the first computer I built myself was made of old parts from my dad's old work computer. The hard drive was a 30GB quantum fireball. I had the first windows 7 release candidate on it, now THAT made some noise booting up! The P4 was the one D850EMV2 board with RDRAM at 1066MHz. 2.8GHz processor. Was a very very good computer for what it was.
Hearing those initialization sounds from the hard drive, that is definitely a hard drive from Quantum. I have an old Power Macintosh that used to have a quantum drive until it died on me with the click of death. I went with a Seagate Barracuda 50-pin SCSI drive afterwards.
I still have a quantum drive in my retro build, but left it disconnected. I forgot how much noise it made when I turned it on after so many years. It was my first own bought drive. It's now on display in my reverse sleeper retro build. Placed vertically behind the glass side window. Polished the metal on the drive so it looks a bit nicer. The metal is very rough though. Lots of little pits.
Gosh I just recycled two of these beauties. One from my very first computer, and one from when I worked at a PC store in the late 90's. Godspeed Quantum Bigfoots
I was a Maxtor and Seagate kid around the time these drives would've been around, back when Seagate made quality drives. Only time I ever saw Quantum drives before TH-cam was after my uncle dented the wall chucking a Bigfoot out his door in frustration, and a Fireball my cousins gave me a couple years later, both dead. The Fireball looked so good I held onto it, still have it too.
I remember those noises very well. Our 1997 IBM Aptiva had a 4 GB Quantum Bigfoot 5.25" hard disk drive in it. It sounded exactly like that when starting up. Honestly I don't miss it at all, that Quantum Bigfoot was a glacial piece of trash and I was so happy when I finally got to replace it with a fast 15 GB IBM 3.5" hard disk. 😄
I get fond memories of old computer labs and repairing PC's for my school from this...and the occasional less than great memory of there always seeming to be one old CRT monitor in the room that would decide it hated life and started that ultra high pitched electronic scream lol
This is the best For putting me to sleep. The sounds of old computer hardware just make me drowsy. I love it. Will definitely feature in my , need to relax playlist
Man, I miss Quantum hard drives. The Bigfoot line was...well, it had issues (sounds like this one's on its way) but the Fireball line was absolutely rock solid and a speed demon for the time. Would have loved to see them continue into the modern era. They're still kicking as a storage appliance company but they're market cap is pretty small. Now we've only got two HDD brands left, one of which is terrible. :(
when I worked at compUSA repair/refurb, we used to get allot of compaq Presarios returned with the because of the quantum bigfoot failure . I even got some returned after the replacement drive failed . eventually compaq stop sending quantum big foots as replacements and sent us seagate drives
Lol, I bought a quantum fireball drive about 2 months after a friend of mine did. Mine failed 2 months after his did, about 18 months after purchase. Garbage!
I miss Quantum drives as well. The Quantum Bigfoot drives, they be big, they were loud, and they were slow. But the Fireballs, they were some of the fastest 720RPM drives you could buy at the time. Quantum was also the only drive brand that I never had fail on me. And a friend of mine, I put the last Quantum Fireball drive ever produced into a computer I built for him, and it was still running just fine ten years after purchase, before he finally retired that drive. I also had surprisingly good luck with Maxtor drives, even though they seemed to fail for others all the time.
FWIW, I know that this goes against the common experience, but I've had much better luck with seagates in personal rigs than I have with WD drives. Only reason I went with WD for my NAS drives is that shucking elements for white label reds was WAY cheaper than buying ironwolfs, and seagates shuckables used SMT drives.
Oh, the memories! I had one of those Bigfoots on my first computer, a whooping 1gb for my Win95 and all my games xD It didn't lasted long, and started to make the click noises. I made three partitions, the middle one being the area that was damaged and couldn't be used.
-I was especially interested in the section on LGR’s video unit. The one that recorded the static. -Continue. -The fact that it recorded static isn’t what interests me. [Long pause] -Continue -What interests me, is that it recorded approximately 18 minutes of it. [Leans forward] -That is interesting, isn’t it? 🥸🤓😂
I built at least 100 custom PCs in the day with these drives. The fail rate was high, and as I recall, they made a particular sequence of noises when they died, which made troubleshooting easy.
I used to work on submarines and in the 'old days' we had a HUGE hard drive for our sonar and fire control systems: IBM 62PC Piccolo - Huge 64MB Hard Drive from 1979 It was the size of two basket balls.
I have a Bigfoot drive floating around somewhere in storage, worked perfectly last time I had it in use about the beginning of last year. I love the scratchy sounds old drives make though my hubby always complains about it
Man that takes me back to the days of my Quantum Fireball 1080 AT, loading Windows 95. When i was little I thought that hard drive noise was the CPU processing.
My first proper 3d gaming pc came with a 20gb bigfoot, I remember it was kind of loud but soothing. I'd sometimes hear it whirring and clicking through the night (my pc was next to my bed). This video makes me nostalgic for those 1999 days of playing Everquest on my Compaq.
-Build a desktop PC -Reject liquid cooling, embrace fanne -Reject SSD, embrace HDe -Reject streaming, embrace opticale Bobs your uncle, fannys your aunt, you're there
This is exactly the sound of my childhood on our old Mac II, playing Sim City and Air Combat and doodling in Mac Paint. Thanks for the trip down memory lane Clint!
My wife has been listening to a "jazz over coffeehouse ambient noise" youtube channel while WFH; finally I have something similarly soothing for myself
The Bigfoot! I have one of those kicking around in my Compaq that sat in my garage for 5 years in the cold/hot. Still works! Need to back it up as well....it has all my childhood games and files on it.
I've found that adding a heatsink to the chip closest to the power rail on The Quantum Fireball, 3.5 series, etc. really helps extend the life of the drives.
That sound of HD heads still makes me nervous. You became sensitive to every sound and anything out of the ordinary usually meant a drive failure which happened a LOT. I don't miss those days.
That's the thing - the noise gave you feedback that could help you predict an oncoming failure. SSDs, no such luck... you have no warning unless you had the foresight to install CrystalDisk and check it every day. Much harder to peg now if poor drive performance is due to a bad drive, a bad MoBo, Windows being stupid, or what.
@@iaobtc Yes I've had a couple of SSDs die on me and there is usually no warning. They just stop working. Difference is they are relatively cheap as is cloud storage.
@@kirishima638 I use cloud storage as little as humanly possible. They're never going to care about my data (outside of what they can make mining it) as much as I am.
And if the sounds of an IBM AT and its Seagate ST-4038 are more your style: th-cam.com/video/eSNqzTwHiuU/w-d-xo.html
quantum 52mb was my most precious drive as it didnt fail for almost 10 years!!!
The bigfoot was my favourite sounding. Still have two, 2gb Drives I use in my DOS machine. Dam things last forever lolz :)
uummmm ... hear all that 5400 RPM magic 🤤........... I have several WD800 (7200 RPM) that I bought through the years.. the oldest one is from Nov-5-2001 🙂......... I use them for backup my CD colección.. then my DVD collection.. and now I store some eventual ISO CD's or DVD's of the few offline software that you can get and use this days😕........... the one with more hour of work is in my PC Pentium III since 2005 maybe🤔.. 50895 hours.. almost 6 years of constant running 😳.... and only 45 relocated sectors 😏... good Hard Drive... good Hard Drive😏.. don't believe me.. you can get them for peanuts.... are everywhere.... because people still have them.... and put them to sale because they still work 🧐...
This is fine. And I beg you, upload an 8 hour loop of the post-boot soundscape. For reasons 😴
@@Raider0001 OMG but the memories of these sounds though?!?!?!
The truest test of "is my audience on the same wavelength as me?", has to be to put out a neigh 20 minute video of nothing but hard drive noises, and see how it does.. great work Clint, inspired video my dude
We are in Quantum entanglement with him
Nigh on.
@@TheInfinitySystem Ha! Indeed, autocorrect got the better of me there.. I'll leave it unedited though, as I find it amusing.
@@TheInfinitySystem Indeed! fancy seeing y'all here! :p
How big big foot?
I used to work for Quantum driving a fork lift in their warehouse. Boxes of drives would routinely get knocked off the shelves and fall 30-40ft. Management told us if you couldn't see damage to the outside of the box then it was fine to ship. My belated apologies to everyone who I caused to lose data.
I used to work doing Quantum RMA's in Canada so you kept me employed. Then I went on to work in data recovery, even better for business! So thanks! Bigfoots were the worst!
I used to live in Lake Mary FL, home of Conner. I think both were bought out. Used to dumpster dive for old floppies and hardware.
Had you said IBM, we would have finally uncovered the root cause of the infamous DeathStar series ! 😅
This does kinda explain why they have a reputation for early death... apart from just being old
@@JohnnyTorontoEh as the only IT guy in the warehouse, it hurt sending those out, glad you at least had an upside. I suppose I did too as I was just out of college and that let me put a major tech company on my resume as a starter job.
These HDD sounds, a floppy drive reading a broken disk and a dot matrix printer working far away in the background are like a lullabies for everyone over 30...
So tempted to download and repeat for 8 hours. This is just sleepy time.
Dial up modem too, I don't know if it was the excitement of seeing boobs or how much of a nerd teenage me was but that always gets the heart going.
Oh yeah, sweet memories...
That clicking within the first 30 seconds was an instant blast of nostalgia.
Over thirty? Forty, at least. And that’s being generous.
I used to build PC's for a local computer shop when these drives were new. That unmistakable Quantum drive chatter is forever etched in my brain!
same
It's cool how computers can be quiet these days, but I just miss times when it was late in the night, the CRT was glowing into your face and all you heard was the computer running and drives spinning
Yes, taken for granted at the time. I agree I do kinda miss miss it but I guess nothing stays the same for ever and those M.2 drives are blazing fast, low power as well
Those halcyon days when computers were real machines you had to know how to use, not just out of the box, RGB festooned toys for people to play Fortnite on.
If I could use an MFM drive/controller in my gaming rig just for document storage (40MB drive?) just to hear the whirr/POST clatter/sync it'd be worth it. My God someone make an adapter for PCI-E for an ISA card!
@@NickDalzell they do have HDD clickers i believe
I still have a Quantum Bigfoot in my original HP Pavilion from 1996. Nothing quite as soothing as that continuous, high-pitch hum and the deafening silence when it finally shut down.
Well said regarding that instant silence.
I had a TX 4gb in a HP Pavilion that one day decided to go klunk klunk klunk klunk and spun down, after that it refused to boot Windows 98SE. HP replaced it with a 20GB 40GV IBM glass platter Deskstar that also died in a short time.
I remember when, back in the 90ies, I was able to recognize the manufacturer of a hard drive just by the noises it made, without having to see the disk drive itself. Units from each maker had a very distinctive "noise profile" made by the sound of the spindle motor (especially at startup as the motor's soft starter circuit kicks in), the initial head calibration sequence and the timbre of the head actuator during the seeking.
I was so obsessed with hard drives (and still I am) that after collecting them for years now I probably have a couple of hundreds of units in my collection.
I could do the same, and Samsung drives at the time ironically had a high failure rate. So whenever anyone brought a machine into the depot with hard drive symptoms, I powered it on and if I heard a Samsung I knew that was the likely culprit.
@@mymediapc9521 Was Conner for me. I could tell if a PC had a Conner drive and it was almost always dead. Them and the infamous Kalok Octagon drive.
What was your favorite sounding hard drive manufacturer from the 90s?
@@Caleb-fv5fp Uuuh, difficult question as I liked almost all of them, each brand made very unique and recognizable noises. For example I remember Fujitsu drives had a very peculiar noise, like a bird nervously chirping inside your computer :-D
@@Caleb-fv5fpnot OP but that would be 7200 rpm quantum fireball’s and ibm Deskstars.
The satisfaction of doing something on your computer directly causing the clicks/motor spinning is so good.
Multiply this audio by ten, and it sounds like the LAN parties from when I was young and everyone copied everything from each-other. Those were the days!
Soooo many games, movies, and music was traded.....
I believe I need a 10 hour loop of this. Why do I find this relaxing? Probably mostly nostalgia. Thank you for this upload!
Seconding this notion. 8 hour loop for sure. Would sleep like a baby.
@@agenericaccount3935 noth of you know there's a loop video button right?
@@SquintyGears Yes, but a genuine native long loop is a lot easier to deal with. The dead air of the loop Function as it starts again is a total buzzkill
@@agenericaccount3935 i don't use the youtube app so i didn't know it was that dumb
@@SquintyGears kinda sucks ngl
Oh yes, those 5.25" quantum drives with tiny window so you could see the thingy do it's thing... and it was so huge with 5GB of data!
I never saw one of those. But having taken hard drives apart, I've noticed they're much shinier than any mirror, flawless too. So I'd be amazed if you could even tell that they were spinning! Or were they over the heads? That twitched so fast you wouldn't be able to see them move either!
Imagine once upon a time being told that you had absolutely no excuse to need to drive as big as five gigs? Nowadays people complain about one terabyte being too small
Finally, the type of content I was subscribed for. Thank you.
(I love all of your content.)
The "Soothing Sounds of the IBM PC AT" video was always with me during lockdown. :)
Time to continue the habit...
This was honestly so enjoyable. Getting to hear those sounds really brought back nostalgia. Thank you so much for preserving this
This is exactly the content I crave. What's funny to me is that this whole channel feels like a offshoot of that one mechanical switch video you accidentally put up on your main channel that wasn't meant to be public
I think I'll go pull that one up, too.
In my old dumpster diving for PC parts days I liked these a lot just because they had an LED on them and my other harddrives didn't lol. As an IT helper for my high school I would also sneakily install one of these dumpster dived hard drives in a school computer right before the school day started (They trusted me with a key to the computer room), and I'd background some downloads and fill it up with games, MP3s and at the time fancy new DivX movies on their at the time impressive DSL (me having only 56k at home), and then take the drive back home at the end of the day.
I had stacks of hard drives like these, so many random 3com network cards, old Sound blasters and so much random old RAM in those days lol. Being a broke teen and asking schools, municipal government and universities if you can go through their tech trash gave me so much fun junk
@@kerbolax i rarely found anything where i lived as a teenager, but my uni emptied out an old computer lab at some point after the last guy who worked there retired. it was amazing, while the junk was waiting to be picked up for recycling, (having asked for permission) i went through it all and walked home multiple times with as much as i could carry. no one else in the building seemed to be interested.
Man i miss those days
The 3.5" floppy drive A: seek to 5.25" floppy drive B: seek followed by the PC speaker post beep is the melody of my childhood.
I love when LGR does an ASMR video.
Thank you! It may sound strange, but just hearing this brings back so many memories to me. Sitting at my desk in a server room (my first "real tech job") 3 feet away from a rack full of these, making sure customers websites stayed up and running.
Strange? No seriously anyone of right age is in love with this. Its soothing
Now all someone needs to do is when the first quantum computer comes out have these be one of the hard drives for it 🤣
It's a strangely soothing sound.
Quantum computers are already out and many companies are selling, using, and renting them. They're just not for consumers because the physical requirements for housing and running one are pretty intense. You can rent time to run code on quantum computers from Microsoft and others. Microsoft even developed a coding language for quantum computers called Q#.
Only one? Let's hear a simultaneous power-up of say 100 of these babies!
This is great! More of these please! Let's not forget the sounds of past computer lab life! LOL We need a sound library of old computer equipment like this to run as background noise! :)
If you like these old drives and their sounds, feel free to check out the drives featured on my channel (:
This is basically what my childhood Windows 98 computer sounded like. What a pleasure to experience the sound of it again.
My father had been one of the first devs in my area, back in the day. His studio was next the bedrooms of mine and my brother's, he used to work late at night, and we feel asleep with the sound of him typing on his old Model M (I still have it, and I used that until a couple of years ago, now it needs some overhaul) and all the sounds from his old PC, like the hard drives and the whirling fans. This video reminded me those days, when my brother and I couldn't sleep without the soothing sounds of our father's work. Miss him everyday
For those of use who haven't had one of these old machines in years, this is nostalgia!
I could sleep to this.
Would certainly blot out the Tinnitus.
oh man those old Quantum drives with the activity LED on the bottom I'd forgotten...
also the first drive i ever accidentally broke was a 3GB Quantum
very soothing like those ambient recordings of a soft summer rain
Please make more videos like this!!!
This has my nostalgia senses tingling. And great background noise while working.
damn i wasnt born yet when those were the standard i grew up on the old 3.5 inch HDDs days
cool vid
With loud drivers like these, Clint can patent the first ever driver-propelled flying device, and 10 years from now, LGR Airlines will be formed.
these aren't even loud... these were considered quiet when they were new, compared to the monsters of the 80s, but compared to modern drives post 2015-ish, yeah they're very loud
Airplanes that look like they’re made of wood panelling!!
This makes no sense.
@@willsofer3679 Because of all the things that look like wood panelling in LGR videos
@@MrBillmcminn Not you. I was replying to Agsma. The joke doesn't really make any sense, if you actually read it.
That single Noctua fan/adapter cable completely breaks the immersion XD
One forgets how loud these things could be. I calibrated the volume with the sound of your mouse clicks to mine, and boy oh boy has technology progressed since then!
Changed, yes, sped up, certainly. Progress, though, that's debatable.
@@iaobtc yeah, SSD's are no progress at all XD
@@Vein1986 more of a sidegrade. They're faster but they can be less stable and reliable long-term. Just because you can't see the moving parts doesn't mean there are no moving parts. Finally, they've basically given modern software devs a blank check to write all the buggy, sh*tty, unoptimized code they want because they can lean on everyone having a fast SSD, which will inevitably lead to the same bloat and choked, slow performance they were supposed to "free" us from the HDD. Within this decade you're going to see consumer machines that take as long to boot and warm up as 90s machines just because of that issue.
@@iaobtc how else are they going to sell ultra HD supersonic hypercharge liquid state drives? 😅
@@iaobtc Progress is not improvement, just movement!
Though in terms of noise I do think silent is better, nostalgia aside.
I've always been fascinated by the big foot's form factor. I don't know the story of why they made those slim 5.25" drives when every other manufacturer had settled on the 3.5" bay. Loving how they have their own soldered on activity LEDs. Thanks for making them visible in this video!
I know the early Bigfoot drives had a bad reputation, but in my experience the later ones are perfectly fine. And if it's lasted this long, it'll probably outlast that 3.5" drive, due to the lower data density of the 5.25" drive platters.
Unfortunately Scandisk doing a thorough check came back with plenty of bad sectors and other errors. You can also hear the mechanism struggling later on in the vid, and sometimes it even refuses to read at all on first boot with some loud head knocking noises, so it was worth backing things up and moving onto another drive.
The Fireball is only temporary for a future project, it's all backed up elsewhere when that inevitably fails too. I'm going to keep this Bigfoot going until it fully dies though :)
@@LGRBlerbs That's pretty much how my BigFoot went, I just keep it around these days cos it's cool... :P
@@LGRBlerbs you should try soaking it in dish soap for a smoothier end user experience.
Hey Vwestlife. If you ever are interested in a modern high capacity and high endurance drive check out the WD Gold HDD Series. They are really quite fast for a HDD as well.
Downside (or upside to me), they produce more noise than other modern 3.5 inch HDD.
Sidenote, is this the one you did a thrift video on with the little see through window?
@@LGRBlerbs I've still got three different bigfoot drives that last time I fired them up were still going strong, guess I should spin them up sometime and see how they are holding up, all from back when 4GB was alot of HDD space to fill.
This reminds me of working in server rooms in the late 90’s early 2000’s before they were called data centers. Every server a tower, no rack-mounts to be seen. Everything spun at 5400rpm; HDD’s, fans, air-cons. Everything at 120dB.
Back in the 90s when I worked for a Packard Bell repair depot, I used to be able to tell the hard drive manufacturer just by the sound of their spin up and seek noises. I both miss and don't miss those days.
As great as these sounds might be, after years of three 10k SCSI hard drives being 6 feet away from my head while I slept, I don't really miss it that much. Call me crazy :D
This brings back memories. Damn.
OMG Windows 95 running a defrag. This takes me back to my early teen years and I get instant flashbacks of great Duke 3D, Worms, Command & Conquer and Quake memories. I'm going to go back and listen to a commenter's AT sounds because then I'll be back to my childhood remembering beautiful DOS machines with big fat bezels and 5 1/2 inch floppies playing Shadow Caster, Dune II, AlleyCat, Mig-29 Fullcrum, Chuck Yeagers Air Combat, Indianapolis 500 and endless QBasic games. Thank you all for these sounds!
This is awesome! It makes you realize just how far computer storage has come over the years. Not just in capacity and form factor but also quietness.
1st 30 seconds, soothing sounds of sweet dreams, 11m55s in, the sounds of my nightmares and many of panic induce wakeups and sleepless nights before school.
How ironic that I just so happened to search what the Quantum Hard drive sounded like, and you posted this gem 5 days ago. Nice!
as a teen, the first computer I built myself was made of old parts from my dad's old work computer. The hard drive was a 30GB quantum fireball. I had the first windows 7 release candidate on it, now THAT made some noise booting up! The P4 was the one D850EMV2 board with RDRAM at 1066MHz. 2.8GHz processor. Was a very very good computer for what it was.
Hearing those initialization sounds from the hard drive, that is definitely a hard drive from Quantum.
I have an old Power Macintosh that used to have a quantum drive until it died on me with the click of death. I went with a Seagate Barracuda 50-pin SCSI drive afterwards.
The startup sound of an Abrams tank is very similar to these drives, since it uses a turbine engine which takes a while to start, a minute in fact.
This video made me feel as if I was being more productive whilst working. It was as the noise made me think I was getting things done.
Boy, does this bring back memories of grandpas office. CAD and accounting software just always running
Listening to this whilst working makes everything feel that much more authentic.
I still have a quantum drive in my retro build, but left it disconnected. I forgot how much noise it made when I turned it on after so many years. It was my first own bought drive.
It's now on display in my reverse sleeper retro build. Placed vertically behind the glass side window. Polished the metal on the drive so it looks a bit nicer. The metal is very rough though. Lots of little pits.
My friend: "so, what kind of ASMR do you like?"
Me. "it's complicated"
God, I love those bigfoots, we used to call ‘m paving slabs cause they were so big
Ahh Retro Computer ASMR, my favourite!
Gosh I just recycled two of these beauties. One from my very first computer, and one from when I worked at a PC store in the late 90's. Godspeed Quantum Bigfoots
I was a Maxtor and Seagate kid around the time these drives would've been around, back when Seagate made quality drives. Only time I ever saw Quantum drives before TH-cam was after my uncle dented the wall chucking a Bigfoot out his door in frustration, and a Fireball my cousins gave me a couple years later, both dead. The Fireball looked so good I held onto it, still have it too.
omg I need a 10 hour video of just the hard drive idling. This brought back so many memories.
I remember those noises very well. Our 1997 IBM Aptiva had a 4 GB Quantum Bigfoot 5.25" hard disk drive in it. It sounded exactly like that when starting up. Honestly I don't miss it at all, that Quantum Bigfoot was a glacial piece of trash and I was so happy when I finally got to replace it with a fast 15 GB IBM 3.5" hard disk. 😄
I get fond memories of old computer labs and repairing PC's for my school from this...and the occasional less than great memory of there always seeming to be one old CRT monitor in the room that would decide it hated life and started that ultra high pitched electronic scream lol
This is the best
For putting me to sleep. The sounds of old computer hardware just make me drowsy. I love it. Will definitely feature in my , need to relax playlist
Man, I miss Quantum hard drives. The Bigfoot line was...well, it had issues (sounds like this one's on its way) but the Fireball line was absolutely rock solid and a speed demon for the time. Would have loved to see them continue into the modern era. They're still kicking as a storage appliance company but they're market cap is pretty small. Now we've only got two HDD brands left, one of which is terrible. :(
when I worked at compUSA repair/refurb, we used to get allot of compaq Presarios returned with the because of the quantum bigfoot failure . I even got some returned after the replacement drive failed . eventually compaq stop sending quantum big foots as replacements and sent us seagate drives
In my experience, Connor drives were trashier.
Lol, I bought a quantum fireball drive about 2 months after a friend of mine did. Mine failed 2 months after his did, about 18 months after purchase. Garbage!
I miss Quantum drives as well. The Quantum Bigfoot drives, they be big, they were loud, and they were slow. But the Fireballs, they were some of the fastest 720RPM drives you could buy at the time.
Quantum was also the only drive brand that I never had fail on me. And a friend of mine, I put the last Quantum Fireball drive ever produced into a computer I built for him, and it was still running just fine ten years after purchase, before he finally retired that drive. I also had surprisingly good luck with Maxtor drives, even though they seemed to fail for others all the time.
FWIW, I know that this goes against the common experience, but I've had much better luck with seagates in personal rigs than I have with WD drives. Only reason I went with WD for my NAS drives is that shucking elements for white label reds was WAY cheaper than buying ironwolfs, and seagates shuckables used SMT drives.
Beautiful ASMR that put me to sleep right away. Thanks so much for that Clint...
The sound of waiting for some Data getting copied from a friend on a LAN-Party in the late 90's... lovely!
Flashbacks. Seriously these sounds take me right back
Oh, the memories! I had one of those Bigfoots on my first computer, a whooping 1gb for my Win95 and all my games xD
It didn't lasted long, and started to make the click noises. I made three partitions, the middle one being the area that was damaged and couldn't be used.
Quantum Bigfoot and Quantum Fireball? Love those fireballs, coolest drive name ever.
-I was especially interested in the section on LGR’s video unit. The one that recorded the static.
-Continue.
-The fact that it recorded static isn’t what interests me.
[Long pause]
-Continue
-What interests me, is that it recorded approximately 18 minutes of it.
[Leans forward]
-That is interesting, isn’t it? 🥸🤓😂
The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.
@@EstebanSagrero One of the best scenes. 💗
I had a Bigfoot in my childhood PC. They're loud, but that's what makes their charm.
I had a Bigfoot in my PIII machine. 1.2Gigs was so huge back in the day.
I built at least 100 custom PCs in the day with these drives. The fail rate was high, and as I recall, they made a particular sequence of noises when they died, which made troubleshooting easy.
Fantastic. I’m looping this as white noise when I sleep from now on…
I used to work on submarines and in the 'old days' we had a HUGE hard drive for our sonar and fire control systems:
IBM 62PC Piccolo - Huge 64MB Hard Drive from 1979 It was the size of two basket balls.
I don't know what I was expecting, but this video delivered exactly what's in the title, and nothing more.
The hard drives spinning, the floppy disc drive seeking, the processor coil whine... the POST beep... ahh memories..
legit almost forgot this was playing in the background. So soothing...
Ah the sweet sounds of spinning media. Enjoy it while it lasts people. It too will soon be a full relic of the past.
Hi Clint, long time fan. This will now be included into my asmr playlist. Thank you.
I have a Bigfoot drive floating around somewhere in storage, worked perfectly last time I had it in use about the beginning of last year. I love the scratchy sounds old drives make though my hubby always complains about it
Man that takes me back to the days of my Quantum Fireball 1080 AT, loading Windows 95.
When i was little I thought that hard drive noise was the CPU processing.
I got a chill when I saw that Bigfoot - the hours of pain, anguish and looking for copies of files on floppy disk...
I still have mine from my old win 98 machine. 2gb was huge back then.
That startup sound had me instinctively looking around to buckle in for takeoff!
Reminds me of how i watched the defragmentation tool do it's thing, because i had nothing better to do :D
My first proper 3d gaming pc came with a 20gb bigfoot, I remember it was kind of loud but soothing. I'd sometimes hear it whirring and clicking through the night (my pc was next to my bed). This video makes me nostalgic for those 1999 days of playing Everquest on my Compaq.
right up there with the sound of a modem handshake in nostalgic value.
the sound of a world before instant gratification.
Brings back so many memories. Man I want this again for some reason
-Build a desktop PC
-Reject liquid cooling, embrace fanne
-Reject SSD, embrace HDe
-Reject streaming, embrace opticale
Bobs your uncle, fannys your aunt, you're there
@@iaobtc Haha
Oh man, I just the other day swapped out a Western Digital Caviar drive for a Quantum Fireball 1080AT in my 486 build and this gets posted. So good.
This shouldn't be as soothing as it is! This is basically ASMR!
The sweet sounds of my childhood. I still get some of that with my DOS machine.
This is exactly the sound of my childhood on our old Mac II, playing Sim City and Air Combat and doodling in Mac Paint. Thanks for the trip down memory lane Clint!
Just found my new ringtone. Thanks Clint!
I listened to this entire video in the background. I have no regrets.
My wife has been listening to a "jazz over coffeehouse ambient noise" youtube channel while WFH; finally I have something similarly soothing for myself
This is the sound I didn’t appreciate at the time, but now that it’s gone, I feel like there’s something missing.
The Bigfoot! I have one of those kicking around in my Compaq that sat in my garage for 5 years in the cold/hot. Still works! Need to back it up as well....it has all my childhood games and files on it.
I had a 2.5GB one and a 6.5GB one and loved them dearly. LOVED the boot up sound the heads made 😊
Sound of my youth!!!! Thank you so much for this amazing video!!!!
Exactly this noise potpourris has led at that time on many LANs to the fact that we regularly fell asleep in front of the pc during game breaks.
I've found that adding a heatsink to the chip closest to the power rail on The Quantum Fireball, 3.5 series, etc. really helps extend the life of the drives.
Right up there with the MODEM dial up handshake. Classic.
I had a Quantum Fireball 2,1Gb back in the days. I don’t miss the sound at all.
Nerd ASMR
Loving the activity LED on the drive board.
That sound of HD heads still makes me nervous. You became sensitive to every sound and anything out of the ordinary usually meant a drive failure which happened a LOT. I don't miss those days.
Some of the later noises it makes when errors occur may give you some bad flashbacks then!
That's the thing - the noise gave you feedback that could help you predict an oncoming failure. SSDs, no such luck... you have no warning unless you had the foresight to install CrystalDisk and check it every day. Much harder to peg now if poor drive performance is due to a bad drive, a bad MoBo, Windows being stupid, or what.
@@iaobtc Yes I've had a couple of SSDs die on me and there is usually no warning. They just stop working.
Difference is they are relatively cheap as is cloud storage.
@@kirishima638 I use cloud storage as little as humanly possible. They're never going to care about my data (outside of what they can make mining it) as much as I am.
For real, Norton cloud backup lost all my moms files. Rip