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Harddrive Speakers
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."
I cant stand computer noise anymore. Maxtor and WD drives are almost quiet enough, but as you point out they are seriously lacking in latency. IDE isn't that great bus either (no disconnect ability). Desktop computers also have a problem with noisy power sources as well.
Anyway, I finally . A totally silent laptop is the way to go.
The owls are not what they seem
There's a trade off there between seek time and noise. Maxtor acutally has acoustic management utilities where you can choose faster seeks or quieter operation.
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I know the head in a floppy drive doesn't work the same way as it does in a hard drive, but I wonder if there's enough similarity to get the same effect? My FDDs seem to die more often than my HDDs so I'd try it with one of them before I take apart my hds
On a similar note, I have an old 10Base-T hub, one of the old metal wall-mount kinds, and if you power it from a 9 volt power supply rather than a 7.5, it actually hisses! It doesn't overheat or anything, I can only think it must be an inductor or something that vibrates in a certain way to make the hissing noise.
We also had a cisco hub at work that does the same thing on it's rated voltage. That one also got really hot though.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
That's why recovery companies open drives in a dust-free environment with hazmat suits on
Well, naturally, that's what they say is the reason. After all, if everyone in the world knew that deadly chemicals were contained in hard drive platters, no one would ever touch a computer again! Don't tell me you actually believe them?!?
Maxtor drives are always very quiet. They have an acoustic management utility you can use to either make them seek faster or be quieter. Even with fast seeks on, they are still very quiet. Maxtor is quickly becoming the best hard disk manufacturer. Their drives are also very reliable and they are the technology leader with the largest dis(c)ks.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Way back when, the printer us poor students were using for batch job print outputs was an HP Corvalis mumblemumble (can't remember the exact model name). IIRC, the printer was not a dot *matrix*, but a dot *line*, i.e. it was a row of pins that ran the width of the print line. No moving heads, part of the whole line would be printed in one shot. (If the mylar guiding band slipped off its control gears, your 200 page listing would be condensed in this black block 2/3rds of a page long.)
(Ouch. Bad description. But bear with me.)
Anyway, we all noticed the different pitches the printer would make depending on what was coming out. We all could make the beginning of a print job and the breaks between the different sections (jcl, code listing, code input, code output, billing info, end of print job -- more or less) without even looking at the printer.
So, one day, some smartass spent the whole weekend typing this weird HP-2000 BASIC(1) program that was that did not make any sense (mostly PRINTs)... But, when ran, made the printer screetch out Beethoven's 9th!!!
I wonder how long it took him to figure out what line pattern mapped to what note.
Hey, why print the Mona Lisa or Einstein's head (remember those old ASCII posters? Boy, was there a hot trade of the card decks to output those!) when you can litterally print music?
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(1) The college used an HP-2000 as a front-end for the mainframe. If not using punched cards, you'd be typing your stuff on an ADM-3A's hooked up to the '2000 using some homebrew line editor to enter you job (jcl, source code & program data) and then used some magic program to submit it to the 3033 (? or was it a 370?) that was doing the actual processing.
That would be the "1541 Music Machine".
Taking advantage of the onboard 6502 processor and 2k of RAM, it made the venerable Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive play a crude, yet recognizable version of "Bicycle built for two", which was the first piece of music ever sung by a digital computer.
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A looooong time ago, at a college not too far away, 1/2 inch tape drives were in very common use. The capstan motors were capable of small movements and could be reversed quickly. IBM had a demonstration set up at one of our E-Days programs with a paper speaker cone mounted on a small stick. The stick was clamped to a capstan and they had a program running to play quite acceptable quality music. IIRC, they could even control the volume. Since this was over 30 years ago, I don't remember all the details but I was impressed at the time.
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