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The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives

Posted by kdawson on Wed Nov 12, 2008 03:28 AM
from the never-want-to-hear-it-twice dept.
Media Data Storage
zzptichka sends along a link to recordings of typical sounds from 35 different failing and dying hard drives. The host of these sounds, Datacent, is in the business of data recovery, so presumably they have heard it all.
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Submission: Failing hard drive sounds by zzptichka (1404391)
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The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives 50 Comments More /

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  • Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:32AM (#25731171)

    Pah, I've been hearing those sounds for ages and my computer's carrying on regardl

    • Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ihmhi (1206036) <i_have_mental_health_issues@yahoo.com> on Wednesday November 12 2008, @08:39AM (#25732527)

      My second ever computer's HD died. When it did, all I saw was my Windows desktop just sitting there - unmoving, like a digital corpse. I restarted and heard "click click click" and thought "why does my computer sound like a metronome?"

      Incidentally, "The Sound of Failing Hard Drives" sounds like an awesome song title for a geek death metal band.

      • Ironically... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Moryath (553296) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @09:30AM (#25733069)

        about 10 minutes ago, all of their hard drives started making those "bad bearing" noises.

        Then they realized they'd been slashdotted and the servers were melting.

        Think we can get them to record the sound of a server dying to Slashdot Effect?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I've been hearing those sounds from my wife for ages. Should I be worried?

      • Might be time to upgrade to wife 2.0. Newer versions may require some customizing and setup but as a geek, that can be kinda fun. Until she blue screens on your for upgrading her incorrectly.

  • Ring tone one is awesome (Score:4, Funny)

    by QuantumG (50515) * <qg@biodome.org> on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:33AM (#25731181) Homepage Journal

    Man, how creepy would that be?

    I bet it got reported as a "virus".

  • Worst Yanni album (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:36AM (#25731187)
    EVER!

  • Play several of the recordings simultaneously! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by adnonsense (826530) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:36AM (#25731191) Homepage Journal
    It's almost musical. In an avant-garde sort of way.

    • But you can't dance to it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Crash Culligan (227354) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @05:19AM (#25731529) Journal

      adnonsense: It's almost musical. In an avant-garde sort of way.

      Heck, I figured that just by reading the summary. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I got to the page and discovered the sounds were all encapsulated in mini Flash players instead of available to download, trim down, and load into the sampler of my choice.

      Nice variety of sounds, but totally inaccessible. I give it a D.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Get yourself a nice little present and install "FlashGot". It is a FireFox plugin and it will download whatever you like, including Flash and embedded media.

      • come on guy. Do an analog loop back and use Audacity to capture it.

    • Re:Play several of the recordings simultaneously! (Score:5, Funny)

      by dword (735428) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @05:46AM (#25731635)

      It's almost musical. In an avant-garde sort of way.

      +1 UserIsHigh

  • That Click! (Score:3, Informative)

    by denmarkw00t (892627) <megsuma@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:44AM (#25731223) Homepage Journal
    I've heard it one too many times, which is >= 1 times. I pretty much give up at that point - once the click starts, your drive quickly begins to stop :(
  • The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

  • Bird sounds (Score:5, Funny)

    by tsa (15680) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:45AM (#25731229) Homepage

    A colleague of mine once demonstrated his bad hard drive as follows: "If I want to load that file, it starts singing." And indeed, the hard drive sang like a bird, but the file was never loaded.

  • Sounds bad (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Wowsers (1151731) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:45AM (#25731235) Journal

    The sound clips were interesting. Thankfully I've never heard these sounds for real. As a precaution I get new drives every so often and do a swap-out "just in case" the older drives might want to fail, it's not as if the drives are that expensive compared to yesteryear. The older drives then get used in non-critical machines so as not to waste them.

    I will point out though that I have heard the one with sounds like head failure (clicking) on a pocket USB connect hard drive (first drive I got of this type). By my own investigation, I found out that when connected to the USB port, the drive started to spin up, then didn't have enough power to send the head all the way across, so it parked itself, then spun again etc. etc. After getting a spliced USB cable, I take power from two USB ports and the drive is working a perfect as any other hard drive.

    • Re:Sounds bad (Score:5, Insightful)

      by something_wicked_thi (918168) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @04:48AM (#25731419)

      That's not a good idea. Hard drives tend to die early or they last for a while, so by swapping the drives out like that, you're just making it more likely that you'll fall victim to hard drive infant mortality.

      If you want to avoid the problem, set up a RAID 1 mirror or similar.

      • Re:Sounds bad (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2008, @06:07AM (#25731737)
        I've two raptor in raid, and I'm worried: by default, they sound like a heavy machinegun in a WWI trench. I wonder what sound they would manage to produce when failing

    • I would guess that the usb port you were connecting it to couldn't supply the maximum 500mA from the usb standard and the drive required it. Was there a bus-powered usb hub involved? Some old motherboards or the front-panels of some cases use a bus-powered hub internally to give you multiple usb ports, so connecting directly to the pc might still mean connecting to a port that couldn't supply full power.

  • The sound of being modded troll (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:46AM (#25731239)

    Involves a penguin being smashed through the Window while squashing apples and ripping up an encyclopedia then setting a fox on fire.

  • but.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    do they make sound if there is no admin around to hear it?

  • Thanks (Score:4, Funny)

    by Elisanre (1108341) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:50AM (#25731253)
    I had to come up with some competition for our boring christmas party and this solves it. -What is wrong with this harddrive and for bonus points who is the manufacturor? weewt!

  • April 1st prank/test material (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2008, @03:55AM (#25731269)

    Setup one of these to play on a computer of your local BOFH and see if he/she is sharp enough to realize that the WD disk in his box cannot make the sound of a failing Maxtor...

  • From my Macintosh LC to my Macbook Pro (even my PCs) I've never had a single hard drive fail me. Am I just lucky or is the occurrence of hard drive failure rare?

    • Re:In all my years. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2008, @04:15AM (#25731335)

      Either you're lucky, or I'm the opposite outlier to balance things out. I've had disks from all manufacturers fail on me, after using them 24/7 for a while. It's tempting to blame the cooling, but they weren't especially warm - I guess it's just a side effect of using a desktop drive harder and more than intended.

      On the positive side, I haven't had any problems for a while now ...
      (And now that I've said that, I fully expect to come home and find at least one drive having caught fire.)

    • I've not had one catastrophically fail (such that it would make a noise I could hear) but I have had old ones constantly become corrupted.
    • It's supposed to be pretty rare but I have three or four dead HDDs lying around here, two of which simply fail to react to the power cable being plugged in. There is no visible damage to the PCBs but I think that's where the prolam probably is.

  • For not so failing drives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RyoShin (610051) <tukaro@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Wednesday November 12 2008, @04:04AM (#25731299) Homepage Journal

    Radiohead's Nude, done with old hard drives and other hardware [youtube.com]. Even if you're not a fan of Radiohead, I think it's worth a watch just to see the setup in action.

    (And don't worry, only the hard drives get "nude", so it's SFW.)

  • Next Slashdot story: (Score:4, Funny)

    by FRiC (416091) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @04:07AM (#25731315) Homepage

    The sound of slashdotted servers.

  • Just in case you don't want or don't need to order data recovery from a professional service, which is often expensive and takes time, here are some do-it-yourself guides for data recovery from broken hard disk drives [repair4harddisk.org]. Of course you will not try these approaches if your data are really precious. But it you can afford to loose the data or you don't want to reveal them to others, these guides are worth a try to get the data resurrected.

  • The sound nightmares are made of. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Willeh (768540) <rwillem@xs4all.nl> on Wednesday November 12 2008, @04:22AM (#25731353)
    Every single one of those made me shiver like a leaf...imagine the lost porn on each of those drives and I think you'll shiver along with me.

  • Yep we hear them all too - fascinating PR win (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wiseleo (15092) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @04:28AM (#25731365) Homepage

    This story is an example of a fascinating marketing win for the PR company handling datacent's account. Drivesavers just did something similar kicking off their FUD campaign against other DR firms, like mine.

    Heck, I published some videos on youtube how to rip apart external enclosures.

    So, what the hell, since this story is a slashvertisement, I'll play along! If you hear such sounds, give me a call as well. I can actually tell you what can be done with your specific drive and don't charge an arm and a leg, just the arm.

    http://www.harddiskcrashed.com/?sl [harddiskcrashed.com]

  • I know all these companies which pretend to be able to rescue hard-drives. But do the ones which ask for a reasonable fee (like $1000) really do anything?

    My sisters hard-drive died after her laptop fell around 25 cm into the table, some guy which is the friend of her boyfriend had looked at it but he couldn't read it so I guessed there was probably not much I could do either.

    I know there is various applications around but in case the head has trashed into the plates I doubt that really helps much? And I gue

    • Re:But is data recovery for real? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Wiseleo (15092) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @05:35AM (#25731587) Homepage

      Well, it depends on your definition of reasonable. We charge about $1200 to replace heads on such a drive. Laptop drives are easier to work on than their big brothers, in my experience. If the firmware isn't corrupt, then basically all you need is a clean bench (aka clean room, laminar flow hood) and a working drive. Impact damage means new heads, new motor, then perhaps firmware recovery as well. But, yeah, fiddling with a crashed drive is not the smartest idea.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Wiseleo (15092)

          The heads are flying above the surface on a tiny cushion of air - about half a micron. If the shock wave is sufficient to disturb the cushion, you got problems. Heads should never touch the surface. A destroyed heads stack is less critical than a destroyed platter surface may be.

          The reason for the fees being so high is because of all the R&D we have to perform in order to be able to fix these things.

          Each brand has its own ways of being fixed. The nature of the damage also alters the chances of recovery.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Wiseleo (15092)

            GetDataBack is one of the better tools, in my experience. Active@ Undelete, UFS Explorer, and R-studio are also part of my arsenal.

            The problem with GetDataBack is that it takes forever to run.

            We only run programs like this on a read-only sector-level image of the damaged hard drive.

  • Do these sounds come installable as part of a windows sound scheme?

    • Nah, they're part of the base schema. With all the swap file use from your average windows install you'll be hearing one of these babies soon enough...

  • Seagate and Quantumfunkel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alarindris (1253418) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @05:31AM (#25731573)
    Hello hard drive, my old friend.
    I've come to boot you up again,
    Because a vision softly creeping
    Left its seeds while I was sleeping
    And the vision that was planted in my brain
    Still remains
    Within the sound of failure.

    In restless dreams I walked alone.
    Narrow halls of servers drone
    neath the halo of an office lamp.
    I lay my forehead gently in my hand
    When my ears were stabbed by the grinding of
    A faulty drive
    That split the night
    And touched the sound of failure.

  • My pet theory here... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vudufixit (581911) on Wednesday November 12 2008, @07:15AM (#25731999)
    I think that hard drives fail earlier and more often than people realize. I've believed for a while now that "winrot" and general perceived operating system instability are most often caused by hard drives in the beginning stages of failure. I think it's an underrated cause of random crashes, and boot errors such as "missing c:\windows\system32\hal.dll, etc" I wish the hardware vendors (Dell, Gateway, Apple, etc) would take more responsbility and be quicker to blame the drive (and replace it), instead of blindly having the end user run the recovery routine. Performing the recovery only papers over the underlying problem by temporarily rebuilding the file system. Because the substrate upon which the operating system rests is decaying, it's only a matter of time before the problems crop up again.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If this were widespread, wouldn't "Linux rot" and "Mac rot" be issues as well?

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