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
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!
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
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.
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!
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 😂
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I dont understand why people keep asking why people create things like this. "Why would you WANT to hear that clicky noise?" They ask when the obvious answer is 'Why not?' i mean back in those days, computers made clicky noises as the hard drive gets read. Some people just want to have it just because that's how computers were back then. I mean we have people porting DOOM to basically everything in existence, including things that are impractical to play on. That nobody actually WANTS to play Doom on. But it's not weather or not it's practical, or if there is a demand for it. It's just for the hell of it. Nobody is going to use a pregnancy test as their number one way to play the game, but it exists because WHY NOT. Same with this, it's literally just a novelty for the hell of it if nothing else.
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.
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 TH-camrs 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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?"
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)
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.
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 😇🙏
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.
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 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 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'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
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!
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.
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": th-cam.com/video/VGEMGFMK2dI/w-d-xo.html Unfortunately, that doesn't really sound "right" either.
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...
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!
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 is hilarious, Clint. I'm an acoustics engineer, and now, finally, we have silent high performance PCs, someone goes and makes them noisier! But I can see the appeal for the retro community.
Actually, to "tone it down a bit" you could "put a sock in it" as they used to say about gramophones. Try cutting a small circle of packing foam (experiment with thicknesses) and poking it into the hole over the piezo-electric driver. That would probably take off the "hard" edge to the sound and drop the volume a bit.
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.
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.
@@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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
@@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've actually heard hard disks sound like that. It's mostly from laptop hard drives when it sounds like that, especially when it clicks almost constantly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!?!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
The absolute best drive sound (floppy or hard drive) I've ever hear is in the AtariST emulator SainT, which had an actual recorded wave files. In fact it was so good those wave files were copied and implemented as optional in various emulators still being worked on. Piezo might be a substitute, but it just does not cut it for _actual_ replication of the sounds. Guess its time for another _useful_ RP2040 Pico project ..
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!
I think the faster seek of SSDs would mean the sound inherently will sound different. The read is not waiting for a physical head to move along the tracks
It does sound like some old drives. But just clicking on disk access is wrong. There is no break in the clicking for the seek times of the hard drive. Nor does it do some random clicks as cache gets flushed to the drive.
I got an old Dell Optiplex because it's what I had as a kid, and it certainly had a super clicky WD Caviar in it so this would kind of work. It would need the pre-programmed start up clicks though and some kind of spin-up whine for the full experience.
I dunno, maybe if it had some kind of motor, it would have a "heavier", more authentic sound complete with vibration. But yeah, having volume and tone controls would be really awesome for this thing. It's super neat!
I would probably mount it with the speaker facing the case. A large part of the tone of a hard disk comes from the disc resonating the PC case and getting all those rich harmonics.
It's a start. The next step on this project would be to vary the intensity of the sound based on how long each LED pulse lasts for, but that might be really tricky to do given how the sound reproduction is happening. Hmm...
Not to mention there's a lot of _je ne sais quoi_ missing from the sound. Seeking, idle states, the comforting spin ups and wind down, an occasional clunk...and if you want, a stepper sound. Also, hello Gemini, pleasure to see you here.
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.
In my head, something that interfaces with an old (possibly dead) drive to make it make the noises without actually reading any data makes more sense, but it’s a cool idea
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. 😂
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
I dont understand why people keep asking why people create things like this.
"Why would you WANT to hear that clicky noise?" They ask when the obvious answer is 'Why not?' i mean back in those days, computers made clicky noises as the hard drive gets read. Some people just want to have it just because that's how computers were back then.
I mean we have people porting DOOM to basically everything in existence, including things that are impractical to play on. That nobody actually WANTS to play Doom on. But it's not weather or not it's practical, or if there is a demand for it. It's just for the hell of it. Nobody is going to use a pregnancy test as their number one way to play the game, but it exists because WHY NOT.
Same with this, it's literally just a novelty for the hell of it if nothing else.
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.
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 TH-camrs 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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 😇🙏
what that thing also needs is stepper motor noises, would be cool if it can bliep too!
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.
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".
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!
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 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.
Nice, now we need a dialup sound generator for our routers
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 personally like a little more bass tone. Deeper crunching sounds. But this is an amazing idea.
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!
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.
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": th-cam.com/video/VGEMGFMK2dI/w-d-xo.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...
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!
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.
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.
This makes me think about the fake engine noises that get pumped into a lot of new cars these days
"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.
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 is hilarious, Clint. I'm an acoustics engineer, and now, finally, we have silent high performance PCs, someone goes and makes them noisier! But I can see the appeal for the retro community.
Actually, to "tone it down a bit" you could "put a sock in it" as they used to say about gramophones. Try cutting a small circle of packing foam (experiment with thicknesses) and poking it into the hole over the piezo-electric driver. That would probably take off the "hard" edge to the sound and drop the volume a bit.
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.
This is.... absolutely magnificent. I didn't know I missed this in my life! I'm ordering one for my retro-rig
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.
Of all your oddwares i've seen, this take the cake 🙂
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.
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
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?
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.
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've actually heard hard disks sound like that. It's mostly from laptop hard drives when it sounds like that, especially when it clicks almost constantly.
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!
It may not sound EXACTLY like a HDD, but it does bring back memories of PCs from back in the day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!?!
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
They need to put this in a kit to convert standard 2.5 HDD's to Flash Card.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I am actually quite happy that PCs and quiet these days though those old school HDD sounds definitely bring back child hood memories
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!
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
This, sir, goes BEYOND THE PALE. The nostalgia shark has been thoroughly jumped.
Music to my ears
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
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
Yay! More clicking!
They did a pretty good job
You were looking for one that sounded like the drive was waiding through sand! 😄
Why??????
Because!!!!!!
@@LGRBlerbs yeah… you tell him Clint 👍
Why not? lmao
The absolute best drive sound (floppy or hard drive) I've ever hear is in the AtariST emulator SainT, which had an actual recorded wave files. In fact it was so good those wave files were copied and implemented as optional in various emulators still being worked on. Piezo might be a substitute, but it just does not cut it for _actual_ replication of the sounds. Guess its time for another _useful_ RP2040 Pico project ..
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!
I pre-ordered one of these & it shipped around the end of October. Will be neat to try out!😊
This is exactly what I’ve wanted for my vintage Macintosh machines with ZuluSCSI. Not hearing the drive crunching away doesn’t seem right.
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.
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.
I used to rely heavily on the HDD clicking noise to gauge whether the software or pc was frozen or just chugging along slowly.
It´s my favorite feature of "surviving mars" - it pretends to load in the tool-tips with exactly that sound. It´s subtle, too.
I think the faster seek of SSDs would mean the sound inherently will sound different. The read is not waiting for a physical head to move along the tracks
While I'm wishing for my PC to be quiet, you wish for it to be loud............that's why I watch this channel! 😆
It does sound like some old drives. But just clicking on disk access is wrong. There is no break in the clicking for the seek times of the hard drive. Nor does it do some random clicks as cache gets flushed to the drive.
Covering the speaker makes sense since the thing making the clicks in a real HDD is inside a small metal box.
Did anyone else hear the 1-1 SMB theme at 12:38 when putting the panel back on the case? 🤣
I got an old Dell Optiplex because it's what I had as a kid, and it certainly had a super clicky WD Caviar in it so this would kind of work. It would need the pre-programmed start up clicks though and some kind of spin-up whine for the full experience.
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.
I dunno, maybe if it had some kind of motor, it would have a "heavier", more authentic sound complete with vibration. But yeah, having volume and tone controls would be really awesome for this thing. It's super neat!
I would probably mount it with the speaker facing the case. A large part of the tone of a hard disk comes from the disc resonating the PC case and getting all those rich harmonics.
It's a start. The next step on this project would be to vary the intensity of the sound based on how long each LED pulse lasts for, but that might be really tricky to do given how the sound reproduction is happening. Hmm...
Not to mention there's a lot of _je ne sais quoi_ missing from the sound. Seeking, idle states, the comforting spin ups and wind down, an occasional clunk...and if you want, a stepper sound.
Also, hello Gemini, pleasure to see you here.
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.
The inverse "fancy car motor sound maker", but for PCs, what a time to be alive.
In my head, something that interfaces with an old (possibly dead) drive to make it make the noises without actually reading any data makes more sense, but it’s a cool idea