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The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives
zzptichka sends along a link to recordings of typical sounds from 35 different failing and dying hard drives. The host of these sounds, Datacent, is in the business of data recovery, so presumably they have heard it all.
Pah, I've been hearing those sounds for ages and my computer's carrying on regardl
Man, how creepy would that be?
I bet it got reported as a "virus".
How we know is more important than what we know.
EVER!
It's almost musical. In an avant-garde sort of way.
The three or four I listened to all sounded pretty similar. Still, I can imagine that some readers here might like them as ringtones...
I've heard it one too many times, which is >= 1 times. I pretty much give up at that point - once the click starts, your drive quickly begins to stop :(
The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
A colleague of mine once demonstrated his bad hard drive as follows: "If I want to load that file, it starts singing." And indeed, the hard drive sang like a bird, but the file was never loaded.
-- Cheers!
... i read it as "the sound of *falling* hard drives". ...
*bonk* *smash* ouch
The sound clips were interesting. Thankfully I've never heard these sounds for real. As a precaution I get new drives every so often and do a swap-out "just in case" the older drives might want to fail, it's not as if the drives are that expensive compared to yesteryear. The older drives then get used in non-critical machines so as not to waste them.
I will point out though that I have heard the one with sounds like head failure (clicking) on a pocket USB connect hard drive (first drive I got of this type). By my own investigation, I found out that when connected to the USB port, the drive started to spin up, then didn't have enough power to send the head all the way across, so it parked itself, then spun again etc. etc. After getting a spliced USB cable, I take power from two USB ports and the drive is working a perfect as any other hard drive.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Involves a penguin being smashed through the Window while squashing apples and ripping up an encyclopedia then setting a fox on fire.
do they make sound if there is no admin around to hear it?
I had to come up with some competition for our boring christmas party and this solves it. -What is wrong with this harddrive and for bonus points who is the manufacturor? weewt!
Setup one of these to play on a computer of your local BOFH and see if he/she is sharp enough to realize that the WD disk in his box cannot make the sound of a failing Maxtor...
That sound you make really turns me on.
From my Macintosh LC to my Macbook Pro (even my PCs) I've never had a single hard drive fail me. Am I just lucky or is the occurrence of hard drive failure rare?
Radiohead's Nude, done with old hard drives and other hardware. Even if you're not a fan of Radiohead, I think it's worth a watch just to see the setup in action.
(And don't worry, only the hard drives get "nude", so it's SFW.)
The sound of slashdotted servers.
Just in case you don't want or don't need to order data recovery from a professional service, which is often expensive and takes time, here are some do-it-yourself guides for data recovery from broken hard disk drives. Of course you will not try these approaches if your data are really precious. But it you can afford to loose the data or you don't want to reveal them to others, these guides are worth a try to get the data resurrected.
Every single one of those made me shiver like a leaf...imagine the lost porn on each of those drives and I think you'll shiver along with me.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
This story is an example of a fascinating marketing win for the PR company handling datacent's account. Drivesavers just did something similar kicking off their FUD campaign against other DR firms, like mine.
Heck, I published some videos on youtube how to rip apart external enclosures.
So, what the hell, since this story is a slashvertisement, I'll play along! If you hear such sounds, give me a call as well. I can actually tell you what can be done with your specific drive and don't charge an arm and a leg, just the arm.
http://www.harddiskcrashed.com/?sl
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
I know all these companies which pretend to be able to rescue hard-drives. But do the ones which ask for a reasonable fee (like $1000) really do anything?
My sisters hard-drive died after her laptop fell around 25 cm into the table, some guy which is the friend of her boyfriend had looked at it but he couldn't read it so I guessed there was probably not much I could do either.
I know there is various applications around but in case the head has trashed into the plates I doubt that really helps much? And I guess the more one fiddle around with it the more the plate can get damaged?
So, does a cheap private person affordable "lab" really do anything extra ordinary which you can't do with a working machine, whatever OS and some pirated recovery software or do they only talk bullshit and can't do shit at all except get your money from the "trouble shooting"?
Click click click click click...... followed by the sound of uncontrollable weeping.
it sounded like a certain female archetype singing
Do these sounds come installable as part of a windows sound scheme?
Heck, I figured that just by reading the summary. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I got to the page and discovered the sounds were all encapsulated in mini Flash players instead of available to download, trim down, and load into the sampler of my choice.
Nice variety of sounds, but totally inaccessible. I give it a D.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Hello hard drive, my old friend.
I've come to boot you up again,
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of failure.
In restless dreams I walked alone.
Narrow halls of servers drone
neath the halo of an office lamp.
I lay my forehead gently in my hand
When my ears were stabbed by the grinding of
A faulty drive
That split the night
And touched the sound of failure.
how the hard drives in their data centre will sound after the slashdotting they just received.
This link was almost as interesting as it was the first time it was posted on Slashdot, 3-4 years ago.
Gizmodo had a competition a few years ago:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/announcements/hard-drive-dying-dance-track-winner-151666.php
The winner was incredible, entirely synthesized from drive failure sounds:
http://media.odeo.com/9/4/2/Hitachi_Hard-Drive_Project_-_Noriko_Version.mp3
or
http://beemp3.com/download.php?file=1512610&song=
I think that hard drives fail earlier and more often than people realize. I've believed for a while now that "winrot" and general perceived operating system instability are most often caused by hard drives in the beginning stages of failure. I think it's an underrated cause of random crashes, and boot errors such as "missing c:\windows\system32\hal.dll, etc" I wish the hardware vendors (Dell, Gateway, Apple, etc) would take more responsbility and be quicker to blame the drive (and replace it), instead of blindly having the end user run the recovery routine. Performing the recovery only papers over the underlying problem by temporarily rebuilding the file system. Because the substrate upon which the operating system rests is decaying, it's only a matter of time before the problems crop up again.
I don't really want to go through the horror of listening through all those sound files, but from my own personal experience I don't think "the chainsaw" is on there. When my hard drive crashed, it started with a soft noise which within 30 seconds built to an extremely loud noise akin to a chainsaw, before suddenly and completely seizing up.
... if a hard drive crashes in a server forest, does it make a sound?
ahh never mind.
...software that uses the PC's microphone to listen to the hard drive and compare the input to the failure sounds, giving the user a warning that their drive is on the way out. /not sure whether I'm being sarcastic or not.
It would be interesting to see what it sounds like when a 5400,7200,10k,15k drive
fails and would it be different? If so, I could tell from the sound at least the
drive speed. Is it different for SCSI, IDE, SATA, USB???
Writing a daemon that sits on the machine and plays one of these at slowly increasing volume for 5 seconds at a time throughout the day.
Heh heh...
Like... BEFORE Halloween.
Some of the scariest sounds I've heard in years.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Oh, what a night, late December back in '93
What a very special time for me
As I remember what a night!
Oh what a night,
You know I didn't even know the name
Maxtor, Seagate gonna be the same
Grinding clicking, what a night!
Oh, I got a funny feeling at the first reboot
And I, as I recall with utter disbelief it ended much too soon..
(Oh what a night),
You young whipper snappers talk of the sound of failing drives. I remember and can never forget the smell of failing drives. When you get the call that the system wont boot up and you walk into the computer room to the very distinct smell of a head crash on a 14" platter. You ask the operator "where are the backup disks?" and she says "I tried them all and none of them will work". Oh crap she just trashed the backups.
I think their harddrive(s) crashed...
ether that or they got slashdoted
What's the sound of a flash-based HD failing?
The 1812 Overture.
In times of yore, we had a server in the living room. The hard drive was a full height 5¼ inch SCSI drive with something like 140MB of storage.
It got louder after years. And louder. There were times when you got the sound of a rotary saw when pushing a log through: a loud grinding noise accompanied by a drop of rotation speed that slowly recuperated.
Quite an incentive for making backups. The damn thing never showed a single bad byte in spite of all that. They probably had a loudspeaker built in instead of S.M.A.R.T. in order to convince the sysadmins that a replacement would make the sales department happy.
Finally, after being a conversation piece for at least a year and long expected and scheduled to die spectacularly, I had to give up and replace it anyway since the noise was beginning to endanger my relationship.
Probably too late, but that's a different story.
about 10 minutes ago, all of their hard drives started making those "bad bearing" noises.
Then they realized they'd been slashdotted and the servers were melting.
Think we can get them to record the sound of a server dying to Slashdot Effect?
(1) You got your +5.
(2) You added '?sl' to your link.
(3) So, did you profit?
I come here for the love
To the first four notes of Beethoven's fifth.
I come here for the love
A couple years ago, Gizmodo had a contest to make music out of Hitachi dead hard drive sounds. :D
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/announcements/hard-drive-dying-dance-track-winner-151666.php
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
Reading this made me wonder, what can a regular ol techie do, if anything, in this situation? I'm sure most people on here know the freezer trick (store in a ziplock bag for 5 minutes, let sit outside for about 10 min, then it might work for a bit again, I think it's to get the bearings going again) But what other tricks out there are there to get the data going again, other then getting it professionally fixed up? Can you do a firmware flash on some of the drives?
I'm certain everybody has their own hard drive death story, but here's mine.
I had a summer internship for an IT department at a large engineering firm. I wasn't afraid of Unix, so I was blessed working with that department (1995?). There were these HP 735 (PA-RISC) systems that had recalled hard drives. We were given serial numbers of the drives recalled, but had no way to map the recalled serial numbers to the workstations themselves. The team decided there was no way to realistically handle the recall, so we'd just swap out drives as they failed. Everything was stored on the network and there were only about 4 config files that were unique to each box, so the inconvenience was minimal. After about three failures, I learned the sound they made. Each day I'd walk through a building or a floor, track down and record the boxes that made the sound, take them down at lunch to verify the serial number, then schedule a swapout with the user. "Listening to your hard drive, I have reason to believe it's been recalled and will fail soon" was a pretty good way to get flexibility from a user.
One day, I'd forgotten my list of recalled serial numbers so I called the admin who was overseeing this issue and asked her if she'd mind looking for some numbers. She thought I was kidding and told me to just come back and get my list (way on the other side of the plant). On the third hit on her list, she asked me why I was asking her for these numbers if I already knew they were there. She didn't believe me that I could hear the failing drives but I was able to get over 50 this method; I think I missed about 5. There were areas of the plant that had workstations I never knew to look for, but they came to us soon enough.
Some of the best ones, with direct links to the mp3s (on Coral Cache):
And martyrdom for Datacent's servers:
Since they asked nicely, I'll wait a few days. Now I just have to decide what sequencer to run these up in...
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Well their site seams totally slashdotted and the page text won't load. At least the sounds loaded, I can clearly hear the whining, grinding noise of a dying drive array. Oh wait I left the server room door open, I'll just close it, that's funny the sound stopped. ............ NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooo !
I suggest using SpinRite on your hardrives. Watch the 2 videos on their website, very impressive software. I've been doing emergency data recovery for years and have many tools. I bought a copy and am very pleased, using it on drive I have. SpinRite can't fix everything, some hardrives are mechanically inaccessible and therefore must be recovered the expensive way. At least watch the videos, they are very informative.
I swear, I've heard this before.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
I used to have an MP3 file of the "Hitachi meow", but can't find it now. It may have been a normal sound as opposed to one indicative of an impending drive failure, though.
Had a maxtor 80G die about a month ago. Didn't even realize what it was, every 1/2 hour or so a single, quiet "chirp" would sound. Just above audible, more like background noise, it took me maybe 2 weeks to nail it down as not just my imagination or a bird flying by outside.
Being notably lazy, chalked it up to a dying fan (3 + CPU fan), and put it on my lengthy to-do list. Finally the noise started to increase to the point of slightly annoying, but still was up in the 10+ minute range, long enough that I'd give up hunting for it after a while. I decided I'd deal with it once it was steady enough to isolate.
And it did. Problem was, when it was finally making the noise every couple minutes, I restarted the system, and got that beloved "click, click, click" that is undeniably bad (the kind that makes your power supply freak out). Needless to say, it didn't boot.
The good news was, it was an old drive, I was basically using it to boot and a partition of it as a swap drive. Everything of remote value on it had been copied off it long ago (it's 8 years old, it wasn't entirely a shock that it died).
The bummer was that it died like it did. I've seen plenty of drives die, but either you get plenty of clear warning (after the first one), or they just fail. I've never had one "chirp" so delicately for so long. It lasted at least 2 months since it started, running nearly 24/7. The drive itself showed nothing aside from the usual wear you'd expect after such a long run.
It wasn't that it died, it was that it caught me off-guard the way it did, mixed with the realization that sometimes I'm a little too lazy...
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
If the hard drive owners come to you saying they own her vocal cords or the sounds her vocal cords make... Because they are using the Harley-Davidson vs Honda muffler trademark/patent defense...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1464309/posts
http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2007/11/21/harley-davidson-dynamic-exhaust-system-patent/
If the hard drive manufacturers want, i imagine they could try such a stunt. But, the backlash might be more than they can handle.
But, if your wife can shatter glass, fend off attorneys, and kill hard drives and stop car ignitions, she might be worth all you can defend her for...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
It's badly slashdotted, and annoyingly wrapped in Flash, so I scraped out the MP3s and put them in a torrent (2MB). It's at http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4504421. Enjoy!
We have an old VAXstation still in use here; it was built in 1989, and has a 1990 vintage 204MB and 1991 vintage 425MB drive in it. Both have been in use 24x7 since around 1992, the last time this box was upgraded (to 32MB of RAM, woohoo!). They're noisy, but they always have been.
The system is not heavily loaded, and is idle at night, so it wouldn't be fair to compare these to heavily used server drives. The workstation only goes down for power failures, hooking a CDR or tape device to its external bus (for VAX specific data work) or when we've moved it.
Maybe its just because they're DEC drives ;)
... Never buy Freddy Digital!
Their cache hacks you away!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I once worked with a technician who said listening to hard drive. He went to the extreme of recording the sound to a .wav on his network share with a microphone. I thought this was stupid and mocked him, I was obliged to, but he'd turn out to be right too often, far more right than SMART warning data, which is really only effective in a small number of cases I've found, maybe 30-40%.
I have seagate drives from 160-500gb, new seagates are stealthy quiet, but tend to become more audible as they age, then suddenly die usually without reporting much via SMART. An old Maxtor 80gb has been doing the clicks of death and randomly locking up my Mythbuntu box. From experience these drives give good warning you need to backup.
On a tangent: This for some reason reminds me of http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7687286.stm - it was ironic that the real sounds of space sound eerily like 1950s and later sci-fi movie space sound effects. I have a 10gb Seagate from 2001 that sounds like some hybrid of a jet engine and a buzz saw - becoming increasingly loud. I should record the sound it makes: all it needs is a cool doppler effect and it would sound like the millenium falcon screaming past.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
We've got the disks in the web server squeaking! This page has received more than a million hits in the last several hours. We had to remove it as a temporary measure. Please come back later.
the original link in the article no longer works. I got a webserver error of some sort.
:-(
does anyone have copies of the sounds, or a mirror site?
I really need to compare these sounds because I think 2 of my drives are failing
9/11 Was An Inside Job! http://www.InfoWars.com/
1. Download the referenced "sounds" url in the article.
2. Invite the DBA into the server or hardware room and play sounds.
3. Profit!
(when the DBA has a heart attack, and you hire a much cheaper one -or outsource job to Bangalore)
OKayy... don't like the above?
Well, then- In Soviet Cruz, hard disk crashes YOU! -
--
.
- aqk
F U