• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

How are old hard drives supposed to sound?

goodwill_pillager

goodwill_pillager

New Member
Joined
Oct 7, 2022
Messages
2
This might be a super dumb question but im very new to this so bear with me. I have a mid-late 90s IBM aptiva and the hard drive makes an insanely loud noise. The thing almost shakes the whole computer. Its like a GUHGUHGUHGUHGUH. I used this exact computer when I was young and don't remember it doing this but maybe I was just used to it? I'll try and upload a video of it when im back home soon. Any help is appreciated. Ya boi just wants to play some spy fox. Thanks
 
Some of the early seagate drives that had auto parking heads make even more noises when they spin and and spin down. Here is a video from @vwestlife
I’ve got a few ST251-1 that sound pretty much the same, since I think they are basically the same drive just not RLL certified.
 
While the above examples are typical of a early MFM/RLL drive, a computer from the mid to late 90s would have been fitted with likely an IDE (popular name now PATA) or (much less likely) SCSI drive. Neither of which would make the noise of their predecessors.

 
That depends on the drive. The 1GB Seagate SCSI drive I have is very loud and the 4GB SCSI Micropolis makes all types of disturbing clicky noises. The Micropolis works though I haven't trusted it with any data that matters for decades.
 
One thing I don't miss from the 90s is the "table saw" hard drive sound. Fluid dynamic bearings were a godsend.
 
We had (still have but no longer in use) CDC 80Meg CMD drives in our Honeywells. Now the floor really did shake when compiling a program. The heads have voice coils you can almost put your hand through the middle and a chassis it takes two to lift onto its cabinet rails.

I don't miss the occasional 'smoker' when the heads crashed (still got an alignment kit somewhere)
 
I recall that some Maxtor 5.25' full-height drives had an interesting start-up recalibration sound. The IMI "shoebox" drives could be entertaining if you lifted one end while the thing was operating. That voice-coil positioner worked really hard to overcome gravity...
 
I have tested recently Seagate ST4144R 5.25" full height 123MB RLL, it was surprisingly quiet. Did not here the heads move though. Only the sound of rotating platters. Surely much quieter and smoother than some 3.5" lousy drives, like that drive in post #4 for example.
Unfortunately the drive appeared to be dead, I could not format/read anything. It will have to go to landfill, sigh.
 
So many people never heard these really old drives when they were new. They weren't that loud. Of course, the drives that survived are mostly loud as hell these days, because the bearings, lubricants etc. are done. Similar case with SCSI drives - most people claim these are generally louder. They are not, they just have more power-on hours, as they were used more professionally, so we mainly have loud ones left (this should be obvious, really, as SCSI drives just use a different pcb within the same family of drives).

Vibration is a different thing, however, as these drives move quite a mass around. It's pretty much normal to feel when the heads are moving.
 
Last edited:
I had an ST-238R 5 1/4" RLL Seagate hard drive. It served me well up to the 386/486 era. I remember it always being noisy, even when new. But it was a pleasant, even amusing, sound.

As for the sounds that it made, well, it hard to describe: something like [power on] uuoooooOOOOOOOOHHHHH cling cling...[BIOS found drive] bling cling clingclingcling bling cling [loading DOS]

Nobody needs to the HD activity LED :) One thing that helps is that DOS software only access the disks when loading or writing a document. There is no memory/disk paging, so the disk heads could rest most of the time.

To me, the most irritating hard drives were the first 3 1/2" ones.
 
5.25" FH drives were noisy when spinning especially the 9.1gb ones with a bunch of platters.

I kind of miss the hum of older drives running on my new machines with SSD/NVME.
 
goodwill_pillager said:
This might be a super dumb question but im very new to this so bear with me. I have a mid-late 90s IBM aptiva and the hard drive makes an insanely loud noise. The thing almost shakes the whole computer. Its like a GUHGUHGUHGUHGUH. I used this exact computer when I was young and don't remember it doing this but maybe I was just used to it? I'll try and upload a video of it when im back home soon. Any help is appreciated. Ya boi just wants to play some spy fox. Thanks
Click to expand...
I wouldnt consider a late 90s drive "old". Its pretty modern as modern goes. IT will sound pretty similar to the last PATA drives sold with minor exceptions. Old would be MFM/RLL and SCSI from the early 80's and full height 5.25 drives louder still sound completely different.
 
The apple Profile hard drive (5mb with a modified Seagate ST-506 inside) utilized the Power LED to blink different codes.

In fact most of the ones you come across today will be blinking... as they are mostly broken at this point.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top