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Harddrive Speakers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the take-it-to-the-laser-light-show dept.

paranoidia writes "Ever get annoyed by the loud noise your harddrive makes? I bet you never thought of actually using that to your advantage. A friend here at CMU actually took 3 broken hard drives and got them to spin at certain frequencies outputed by his computer. So in the end, three harddrives are actually now speakers! There are videos and a few pictures with explanations onto how he did this wonderous thing."

5 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Hardly "old news".

    Here's the discussion you wanted anyway: Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers. If I remember correctly, there was a second Slashdot story posted about this site - either a duplicate or a Slashback article. Finding that is left as an exorcism for the reader. ;-)

  2. Re:My 1541 drive was a speaker too! by red_dragon · · Score: 2, Informative

    Didn't those disk drives contain their own processors? I recall hearing they were often programmed to format disks very quickly, so I guess they could be used to play those tunes while the C64 works on something else.

    --
    In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
  3. No frequency filters? by Ozan · · Score: 2, Informative

    He connected the drives parallel to the amp, without any filtering? A lowpass for the big one, highpass for the small and bandpass for other would sound much better as with all drives heads moving similar.

  4. Re:My 1541 drive was a speaker too! by GigsVT · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, they had thier own processor, but they were NOT fast at formatting a disk, it took about 80 seconds, then you had to flip the disk over and format the other side (if you were so inclined to use double sided disks).

    Oh, and copying a disk was lots of fun, considering that the memory could only hold 64K chunks at a time, and the disk held about 180K per side, I think (it was measured in blocks rather than KB back then). You had to keep switching the disks back and forth to make a copy of a full disk.

    --
    I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
  5. Re:My 1541 drive was a speaker too! by mmontour · · Score: 2, Informative

    Didn't those disk drives contain their own processors?

    Yes, they had an on-board CPU and RAM so it was possible to run custom programs on the disk drive. I had one disk-copy program that worked this way; it would automatically copy disks from one drive to another, without involving the main computer (the drives were connected by a daisy-chained serial bus, so you could even unplug the computer from the drive chain once you'd uploaded the program).