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.

Anonymous Coward

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

Ironically...

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?

Ring tone one is awesome

Man, how creepy would that be?

I bet it got reported as a "virus".

Re:Ring tone one is awesome

Uhh.. actually you should have booted up off the CD, selected "recovery console" and then run chkdsk /f c:

Worst Yanni album

EVER!

The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives

The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Re:The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives

The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

If a geek cries out in agony, but nobody is there to hear it, has he made a sound?

Or, until someone opens the basement door, is he like Schrödinger's cat: both screaming and not screaming?

Bird sounds

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

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

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

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

The sound of being modded troll

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

Thanks

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

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...

For not so failing drives

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:

The sound of slashdotted servers.

DIY Data Recovery for Broken HDDs

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.

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

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]

Seagate and Quantumfunkel

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.

Re:but..

Yes, but it's usually accompanied, and drowned out by a screaming engineer.

Re:In all my years.

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.)

But you can't dance to it

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:Play several of the recordings simultaneously!

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

+1 UserIsHigh

Re:But is data recovery for real?

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.