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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."
"Every sound you hear in these movies is being produced by the harddisks and nothing else."
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
The 10K drives in my G4 and the 15K drive in my SGI Octane are pretty loud, but it kinda makes sense... faster spinning SCSI drives have never been known for their whisper operation, more like a jet engine.
That said, most of my other drives in my Windows and Linux PCs are fairly modern 7200 RPM drives. My two newest Maxtor and Western Digital drives are so quiet that I sometimes forget they are spun up. Almost cool to the touch, too.
Now if only 7200 RPM drives would come with 7ms seek times. Heck, the drive in my O2, a 7200 RPM SCSI Seagate Barracuda ST318416 from almost 2 years ago has an average seek of 6.0ms with a max full seek of 10.5ms... a good 3ms faster than the fastest 7200 RPM IDE drives of today.
Not bad... 150 KB/sec. I wonder how long Carnegie Mellon will hold up to the /. effect :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I remember the program that played "Bicycle Built for Two" on the 1541 disk drive motors. Sound quality sucked, sure, but DAMN, that was cool.
Well maybe you should try replacing your sound system with some new harddrives.
*laugh*
No seriously, the sounds recognizable and its a pretty impressive technical feat. Honestly though, I'd like to see a vibrator speaker system as well. Maybe it would turn on some women to new types of music.. omg.. stop me now.
Sigs are awesome huh?
I am actually shocked whenever I here a noisy, clicking hard drive, even though I know it is the norm. I never buy anything but the cheapest Maxtor I can find, and they don't make any noise I can discern over the computer's fan. Why PC manufacturers use anything else when Maxtor is usually the cheapest is beyond me.
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
heh this guy should consider going into business... if he can get things at the right price break he might be able to make a few bucks selling geek specialty items... just put them in a nice case (and if he can demonstrate the sound live, i'd consider buying a pair...
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
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?"
Reminds me of last week's episode of The Simpsons, where Marge's old boyfriend invents a device to turn modem static into music.
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.
Hey this Afrotech stuff is grattttttttttttteee!
Got a real kicker out of this one. Check http://www.afrotechmods.com/ for one hell of a site design.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
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.
I didn't recognize the matrix music myself in that video, but the rest of them were fine, starwars worked.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
BTW- Yes the slashdot search engine is a steaming pile of shit. They really should buy one of Google's fine products or something.
In the near term though, try site:slashdot.org in google, to narrow the search. You can also try the linux search on google, www.google.com/linux.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I'm getting over 500k/sec here :) Basicaly instant downloads on these videos. If only the rest of the internet worked like this :P
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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?!?
I actually have a monitor shell in my basement right now that I plan to do that with. It should be pretty cool... I left the power button on the front so I can use it to control the fish tank lights.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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).
The sound being produced is not the related to the noise some hard drives make. He's not spinning them at particular rates to get different sounds (which would only allow him to produce one frequency per platter anyway). He's vibrating them, just like regular drivers. Still a cool waste of time, but not the least bit what the posting indicated.
I bet this technology could be used to move a cone of paper or other stiff material, which would move a large air mass and create clear sound vibrations, thus reproducing sound...
Nah, too crazy...
Seriously this is very cool and reminds me of the folks who put an AM radio next their Altairs (or whatever it was) and ran different instructions to create different frequency interference, thus creating music.
What I'd REALLY like to see is the microwave interference from a GHz PC fucking with a cordless phone or something, making it ring....could it be done?
Back in 1982 or so, I remember pr0n software for the Apple ][ that used the floppy drive (O, the irony!) for the sound effects. Same principle: it did it by moving the head (hee-hee!) back and forth.
And the brethren went away edified.
Police: Sorry sir, we can ask him to close Windows. Other than that we can't do anything.
Very fsck'ed up.
uhm, just a second...you have a girlfriend(a), she has a vibrator(b). And when you use a and b together you want to play music by using the exact right pressure...
Is it just me, or is that a very wrong time to play with geeky toys?
Just curious, what would one reply after finally succeding at the Star Wars theme and she asks what you're giggling at? Commit suicide by proxy by telling the truth? Just run? hmm
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
$ dmesg | grep hda
hda: Maxtor 90840D6
(more output snipped to appease the lame lameness filter)
It's pretty old I admit, but it's the loudest hard drive I've ever heard and it drives me crazy. Even when the drive is idle the spinning platters sound like a jet engine.
Oh sure, I'm just not sure that's the time to be a full out geek is all... Maybe it's just cause my GF is a body piercer and has access to sharp needles needles should I be too distracted by shiny objects...
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
I don't think these things had a switch mode power supply, they are fed with wall warts, probably just a regulator inside.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Wow, I can only imagine how arousing THAT must have been...
*monochrome green naked woman, or possibly a tree sloth, it's hard to tell, moves across the screen at 4 fps*
"GRONK GRONK GRONK"
I'm getting all tingly just thinking about it.
Freedom: "I won't!"
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!
An engineer who shall remain nameless (cuz I just know what'll happen here if I bring up where I know him from - the Coleco Adam - and yes, there were some very cool things about that machine for its day)
Anyway, he was charged with a program that would make sure the floppy drive was operating before doing other things, so to put it thru its paces, he had it access tracks in the correct order (and therefore musical pitches based on spin) to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" - hear the tune - everything's OK!
That - um *feature* didn't make it to 1.0 though.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
A bunch of Aussies did it first, in 1951. See the story here.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm going to make my speakers store gigabytes of data!
this one might take a while. hmmmm...
Just raise the taxes on crack.
well.. kinda...
;)
I once accidentially connected the internal PC speaker to the HDD led pin on the mobo... well it was some kind of "Harddrive Speaker"... more or less
--
I was doing this same thing with metal-bladed fans when I was a we lad of 12. I didn't make a demonstration out if it, but at least I've got some witnesses.
;-).
Heh... Although, back then, things that didn't have a practical purpose WERE NOT news
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If I recall, the 1541 had a 6502 and 14kb of ram. That was ironic, because I used it with my VIC-20 "computer" that had a 6502 and 3.5kb of ram.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Try it! It makes a really nice analog whirrrrrrring sound.
A ScanJet 4c (I think) we got back in 1994 had a Jukebox.exe program on the driver disk. It's been a while, but I believe it let you play MIDI files on the scanner stepper. Quite clearly, too. I think they yanked the program later on, though, I've never been able to find it again.
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.
If you have a close look at the label (see here or here: sorry, couldn't find larger pictures), the last character is slightly different from the first (it does not have the oblique little dash like the first, so it is not a ``1'' digit).
OTOH, all the Commodore user documentation reported it as 1541...
dining hall trays make excelent mounts for home brew electronics projects
:)
Among other things. Here at the U of Wisconsin - Madison we use use them as sleds.
Lots of fun trying to stop at the bottem of Bascom Hill before you hit the trees...
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
But you could do it by running an audio signal through main coil.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.