Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
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.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.