There’s a sort of morbidly fascinating collection of sounds at this site. The site is a web presence for a data-recovery service named DataCent. They recover data from dead hard drives and other storage devices. Apparently as an attempt to help prospective clients identify potential problems, they’ve put up an impressive catalog of audio recordings of noises emanating from failing hard drives. The recordings of drives with bad bearings are particularly disconcerting.
(Rule of thumb, for those of you who haven’t lived around hard drives for as long as I have: if it makes much noise at all, be worried. Today’s hard drives are usually nearly silent.)
I think that the worst noise I’ve heard from a hard drive came out of a 5.25″ Seagate drive installed in a PC-AT clone. (Yes, this was many years ago. The drive’s capacity was probably 40MB or less, but I don’t remember exactly what it was. I do remember that the clock speed of the CPU was 10MHz, switchable to a 12MHz “turbo” mode.) This was my machine at NCAR during my first programming job. It was actually an absence of noise, to be exact. I came in one morning, turned the thing on, heard the drive spin up–and then spin back down again, never to spin again.
Remarkably enough, I had backed up my work (on 5.25″ floppies) the night before.
That episode taught me a lesson, though: hard drives fail. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Your computer’s drive will probably outlive the useful existence of the computer, but maybe it won’t. If your drive died tomorrow morning, would you have a backup of the data it contains? Think of it this way: if hard drives were completely reliable, companies like DataCent wouldn’t exist. But these companies do exist. Draw your own conclusions.
End of sermon.
