The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives

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.

Yep we hear them all too - fascinating PR win

[Wiseleo]

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]

Re:Sounds bad

[something_wicked_thi]

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.

But you can't dance to it

[Crash Culligan]

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.

My pet theory here...

[vudufixit]

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.

Too bad nobody posted this earlier...

[denzacar]

Like... BEFORE Halloween.

Some of the scariest sounds I've heard in years.

Re:But you can't dance to it

[maxume]

What's wrong with sniffing your traffic with Wireshark and downloading the mp3's directly?

There might be some sort of issue with an ampersand though.

Re:My pet theory here...

[Anonymous Coward]

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