Unique IBM Hard Drive Operating Sounds
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- čas přidán 13. 02. 2013
- Most older hard drives click or tick whenever they're accessed. These old IBM drives are different as they produce a sort of "beeping" noise. This video is nothing more than a demonstration of the startup, seeking and shutdown sounds of one such hard drive.
These "beeping" drives have an unfortunate tendency to fail as a result of what looks to be internal contamination. Every failed example that I've had apart has had this rusty powder inside it, and I think this material came off of the platters. I first noticed this happening back in the early 2000s. Preserving the unique sound of these drives is the entire reason for this video.
IBM produced another interesting hard drive during this time, most of which were seemingly used in the PS/2 Model 30-286. That drive has a variable spindle speed. Its spindle motor is slowed down when the drive is idle and sped up when data is being accessed. These seem to be more reliable, though I don't know if I have a working one at present.
You get extra points if you can guess what PS/2 this drive is installed in. There will be a video about it in the future.
I don't mind if you want to use some or all of this video (or its audio track) in other projects, but I would like to be credited. Thank you. - Věda a technologie
If they made drives that sound like this nowadays, I don't care how slow they were, I'd buy one.
why dont you just buy a vintage one then?
@@user-pr9lw9de8j I mean if I could get a 4TB drive that sounds like that :)
@@user-pr9lw9de8j Because Vintage doesn't work on a modern system and AFAIK no one makes an SATA-to-MFM converter just yet.
@@NickDalzell No, but there is such a device which converts ST-412 (The control method for "MFM" and "RLL" drives, since those are only encoding methods) to SCSI-1. UltraWide SCSI is backwards compatible to some extent, so with the right software and equipment, it is possible to use stepper actuated disks on modern computers. That and there were several which were PATA, which you can get a PCIe controller for.
I miss that sound. It sounds like work being done!
millsfreak your right about the
Actually it would just tick always, even when you are not using the computer actively. Then you would be annoyed "Why are you working!?"
@@iCraftDay theres always sleep/hibernate mode if that helps
@@iCraftDay That's often how I knew malware had infested the machine as it shouldn't have been 'active' in the middle of the night just sitting at the Windows 3.1 desktop.
@@NickDalzell right
Actual sound of me waking up in the morning
god I love the sound of an old HDD!!
I have a modern HDD that makes similar sounds, WD, 500GB :/ I came here to show a friend how my drive sounds like xD
Digi as it happens... so does my old WD3200AAJS XDDD
My WD Blue 1TB is loud :D
These days, if I heard my computer making that sound, I would be more than a bit worried.
Mine still does (it have a nvme ssd, but still one of the 8 other HHD is an old WD that make theeses type of sounds)
this reminds me of where i worked, AT&T Switching office, lots of clicking sounds from old X-Bar Machines. They used relays. They were replaced and now the office is quiet, but somehow i've always missed those clicking sounds.
Also, my grandfather used to work for IBM in the early to late 70's. he has one of those huge 17 MB hard drives from 1979/1980
music to the ears
used to go to sleep to sounds like this when I was a kid. Was looking for asmr of a few disks being accessed...
1800+ views with no talking, no editing, no camerawork, no nothing.. What am I doing WRONG??????? power to you my friend.
Years later, I've come back to this video. I now realize that a few video games use sound samples of these drives as ambient sounds or the sounds of computers "thinking." Mildly entertaining. :)
I've wondered if the audio track from this video was ever used in such things. I don't care about money, but if a movie maker, game/software developer or whoever did use this, I'd at least like to be credited as the source.
You have just made my night.
I was wondering if I was crazy remembering my old IBM having a strange loading sound.
Beautiful drive, I'm sure I've commented on this video in the past, but this is one of my favorite ambience videos of hard disk sounds. It's note entirely unique, there are several similar drives which sound like this, but none so cleanly recorded on CZcams. I have a few in my collection I plan to contribute to the sea of computer noises someday.
Wow i remember those rough initialization sounds at the beginning not to mention with each read sounds like a nail reading a steel platter thx for all your vids !!
I miss these types of sounds older computers made when starting up. Hearing this takes me back a bit and I love it :)
I'm born in 1998, but no matter the age I enjoy listening to a hard drive operating. I'm even trying to mute the rest of my computer so I can hear the hard drive better.
Blast from the past that is. Thanks for this! :)
It was quite common for these drives to have issues. I tore down several PS/2 Model 25s for parts and found that all but one of those with a hard disk had a bad one- the one that wasn't bad was an aftermarket drive from Seagate with an included controller.
At least it isn't an IBM Deskstar (AKA Deathstar).
I have a Hitachi 2.5" Travelstar with a bad sector and I call it Deathstar
+Ashton B. They had a particularly terrible model in their deskstar brand that was infamous for failures a number of years ago.
I think it sounds pretty normal. A Seagate ST-225 now that's a beeper!
ST-225 was 5.25" and used a stepper motor for heads. The drive in this video is a 3.5".
Although I never had a PS/2, I did possess an IBM PS/1 for a time that was given to me by a friend of my dad's. It even had the matching IBM PS/1 branded keyboard, mouse, and monitor. It had a 486/33 as I recall, and a hole had been cut in the front case to accommodate a CD-ROM drive, in addition to the built in 5.25 and 3.5" floppy drives, which were hidden behind a neat little flip down panel, which also had a sticker showing all it's specs. Sadly, it died, but I did take it to a recycler.
Ahh I remember that sound! That particular drive sounds like it still has good bearings too.
Has a very unique sound ... I collect old drives myself and just started recording them as well. On my channel I have a KALOK KL-3100 that really sounds strange, making a high pitched squeal some times.
back when you could tell if your computer froze or not by listening to the harddrive, it was hard mounted too so the case would amplify the sound, i remember silentpcreview forums in the p4 era where people would suspend their HDDs with bungee cords to quiet down their pcs, but nowdays its cool again lol
Thanks, good quality for sfx sound to add to any footage
That sound is much like the old miniscribe drives I used to own a very long time ago.
I regret throwing out my old 380 computer, this stuff has a golden value now!!!
Has a high speed stepper motor instead of a VC positioner. The old Seagate MFM and RLL drives made a very distinct high pitched sound when the heads moved.
I love sooooooo much this little drive
Im loveing this. These are servo tracked. No coil driven
love that sound.
I used to work with a guy who worked on the original Winchester drives. They called them winchesters because it had 30M fixed and 30M removable as I recall. So its 30-30 like the winchester lever action rifles.
Very Cool Hard Drive!
cool, love that noise, reminds me of my school days, with a room full of Amstrads using Winchester hard drives.
The variable speed drive start up sound is the greatest computer sound I've ever heard.
that has to be the coolest sound ever
I want to have an 80s DOS gaming rig with one of those stepper motor driven heads hard drive.
Good point, and all it really included was new (super annoying) sounds, and a few performance tweaks.
I love the sound of those old steppers. ^_^
I actually DIED when I saw that profile picture!!!!
PS/2 Model 50z. I still have my 60MB drive out of the one I had. It might actually be coming your way since I'm kinda interested in seeing whats on it after all these years!
Micro channel interface? The unique sound is the head placement & stepper motor. Drives these days are on a angle and use a voice coil to move around. More can be put on the disk and can be faster accessed with a variable voice coil. Old drive come straight in and only have as many tracks as the stepper motor has steps.
Yes, this drive ultimately connects directly to the Microchannel bus.
Other drives with stepper motors, like the old Seagates (both the ST-251/277 and a later 3.5" ~30 MB IDE drive they produced) don't sound anything like these. It's rare to see one, but Seagate also produced drives for these systems seemingly as a second source to IBM. Those also have stepper motor actuators, but again sound very different.
In 2020 I watched a video of a 30MB hard drive that wouldn't fit on a 30MB hard drive.
Ah - that takes me back...
Reminds me of the days back in the '80s when I would come into work in the morning and power up the ole' IBM 3270 PC AT. Same sounds.
Old golden days
yes, I also tried a known working one. It's strange because the controller also controls the hard drive and it works fine.
Glorious
I have a 100MB Maxtor that sounds very similar, I love the sound it makes!
It still clicks, but not as loud as I remember from harddrives past.
i got my ST-225 working... not completely.. still need a bootdisk dos 3.3
That looks like a PS/2 Model 50Z. That was one of the few that had an hd config like that
It's either 50 or a 50Z, I've forgotten exactly which (though it's still here and working great to this day).
Yours is a name I remember from my time on CSIPH.
Nice, apparently, that's how my ibm mainframe drive should sound if I ever had it connected up, that uses a stepper motor too :o)
I've got a couple old drives floating around that sounds just like this.
Yeah, from back when you had to feed around 30 floppies into the machine to install the OS... Scary... I'm so glad we went to optical media... That said, I do miss the old bigfoot drives that took a whole 5¼" bay. The sound the stepper motor made while moving the heads was pleasant...
Remember those huge 18" business back-up floppies? The ones that needed a metal frame around the perimeter just to keep from being too weak to slide into the drive... I don't miss those or the hassle of corrupt diskettes. Then there was Commodore's OptiFloppie which closely resembled the ZipDisk somehow before it existed. I do miss my Amiga 4000-030 however. I remember dancing circles around Pentium 200Mhz machines with it's little 35Mhz processor. Alas the 250Mb hard disk failed...
Aha, apparently my ibm mainframe drive from 1988 works using a stepper motor like this but I've never been able to connect it up to anything to hear it work like that :o(
Sounds much better than CompactFlash or super modern SSDs!
I had a Mac SE with a 40 meg stepper SCSI hard disk, that bastard was loud. and if it didnt shut down right it would go *grrrrrrrrr inc grrrrrrrrrrr* sometimes repeatedly until it parked. I eventually stuck a ~160meg in there that had 7.5.5 on it which was a lot quieter, this was early in the 2k's I have since destroyed the macSE unfortunately because I screwed up the system by having duplicate system files from screwing around with the compression software that was on the disk and not having a working boot disk of the old system and not knowing how to ROM boot the thing at the time
You miss the SE?
The beeping noise you hear is actually there because the head was moved up and down the platter by a stepper motor.
Most stepper motor based hard drives don't "beep". I grew up during the time when these were new. :-)
I see.
Soothing..
Nice one bill, reminds me of my old mfm/rll seagate drive 21mb :-), they had a certain sound didnt they.
Mine was on a western digital wd 8bit paddle card with the 34 way control socket and two 20 ways for drive 0/1 data.
Cant remember the c/h/s or table number, it never let me down.
others; 21mb full size seagate and miniapolis 30mb.
i kept the cards, and i still have a hardcard type, 8bit ide.
Norton utils for dos was a godsend, and debug to run the lowlevel format rom :-)
Hey by the way bill, I have a toshiba laptop with a date stamp of 1991 and it works great! It runs good old windows 3.1. Sometimes it takes a few tries to fire up and ill assume there are some dry caps somewhere. Just wondering if you'd be interested in a video of it operating a few basic tasks, including xargon! if you've never heard of the game its definitely an interesting dos title. Its still available for download as freeware!
Nostalgia....
know were i can find a copy of dos 6.0 for my pakerd bell legand 650x
I had a question regarding the ISA floppy controller in my 486. The computer will go through the POST and will then slowly spin the platter on the bottom of the floppy drive without turning on the access light or giving me any indication that it is reading the floppy. It will then give me a "DISK BOOT FAILURE" message no matter what floppy I try to boot it from. I have tried two different controllers with various jumper settings but with no luck.
i remember these
groovy
sounds like tiny golf balls bouncing around in there...lol
I remember when these noises used to be normal. Now damn well better have to worry myself when the ssd starts whining like this.
My Seagate SATA notebook HDD from 2008 beeps when it is about to fail....
At first I thought that it might be 'thermal calibration', but the noise seems to be too terrible to justify that. This thing needs some 20W50 ;-)
do you know what the belt kit is for a pioneer kx-50 cassette deck?
I don't even know the last time or if I heard an expletive on uxwbill's channel.
Model 50Z... but I cheated.
Kalok Octagon drives are also beepy, and also failure-prone.
good ol thinking sounds, i miss em. : (
Try playing this on loop on a modern Mac and people give you funny looks.
While I was mucking around in the basement of the place I live at I spied an IBM PS/2 386SL sitting in storage, I've been tempted to ask the owner about letting me tinker with it, is there anything special I should know about before trying to resurrect it?
My 640gb hitachi drive gives a very faint noise during read write operations, its really quiet ;D
you're not doing anything wrong, keep making bike videos !
Oh maybe it was this in our pc!
30 MB HDD, that's from a fairly early one then. Model 50?
are you running Windows XP or 2000?
There are many drives of similar vintage in arrays running old UNIX boxes at 10,000 RPM 24-hours a day. They rarely fail. I could cite specifics. IBM did not learn the same lesson. CZcams seems bent on making us use our own names. What about a video on that topic?
my childhood
The sound on 0:14 the trrrr tr drrr like sound is also made by the hdd ?
nope its the floppy drive initialising
30 mb, large for the day it was built.
Is that dispense coffee tea or milk lol
If youtube tries to force you to use your name, tell them its "Uxw Bill". Who the heck are they to say it isn't so?
did you see garets new computer vid ?
My HP laptop from 2006 makes these sounds :V
MFM drives yay
my wd caviar black 1tb from 2009 does that
Calvin Williams I have a WD Black and Seagate Barracuda in my computer and there is next to no sound even when the HDD activity LED is solid.
+bobba84 newer WD-Blacks aren´t that loud anymore. I also have WD-Blacks from 2008 - 2012, the 2008-2010 ones are loud, the newer generations are just a bit louder than a wd blue with 7200rpm
+bobba84 which model?
+bobba84 hmm i already worked with that and i didn´t think it was loud
Yes the WD Greens are very quiet. But also, i don`t like them. Had some of them, and ALL of them failed, so i will never buy a green again. My choice is WD Black for computers and WD Red for Storage (NAS only)
1701 Hard disk controller failure, eek :-)
What PS/2 is this in?
haha it's thinking
Awww windows in tge 90s ms dos
I want IBM to make drives again :( shouldn't have sold the division to Hitachi
Well, they basically were done with hard drives after their 75GXP series they got sued for.....
@@cdos9186 I realize that now and I didn't really know any better then. I was maybe 14 at the time I wrote that comment and I'm 20 now.
@@sephirothkefka777 Have you ever owned an IBM drive of any kind?
@@cdos9186 I've had one in an old laptop i grew up as a kid (Sony VAIO) and i found an old 3.5 inch drive from a dell that is dead due to a broken flex cable that leads to the read heads.
@@sephirothkefka777 Really? They mainly used the IBM drives in older Dell Desktops such as the 90's Dell Dimensions, which are very collectible now.
What computer is that?
im sorry i gave you the wrong make. its a kenwood kx50
good old (very slow) days
If you like old funny sounding harddrives you should watch my video of my Victor V286C with 31MB kyocera harddrive. I have never heard one like that :)