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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.
It's almost musical. In an avant-garde sort of way.
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.
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.)
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.
Well, it depends on your definition of reasonable. We charge about $1200 to replace heads on such a drive. Laptop drives are easier to work on than their big brothers, in my experience. If the firmware isn't corrupt, then basically all you need is a clean bench (aka clean room, laminar flow hood) and a working drive. Impact damage means new heads, new motor, then perhaps firmware recovery as well. But, yeah, fiddling with a crashed drive is not the smartest idea.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
My second ever computer's HD died. When it did, all I saw was my Windows desktop just sitting there - unmoving, like a digital corpse. I restarted and heard "click click click" and thought "why does my computer sound like a metronome?"
Incidentally, "The Sound of Failing Hard Drives" sounds like an awesome song title for a geek death metal band.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
The heads are flying above the surface on a tiny cushion of air - about half a micron. If the shock wave is sufficient to disturb the cushion, you got problems. Heads should never touch the surface. A destroyed heads stack is less critical than a destroyed platter surface may be.
The reason for the fees being so high is because of all the R&D we have to perform in order to be able to fix these things.
Each brand has its own ways of being fixed. The nature of the damage also alters the chances of recovery.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
GetDataBack is one of the better tools, in my experience. Active@ Undelete, UFS Explorer, and R-studio are also part of my arsenal.
The problem with GetDataBack is that it takes forever to run.
We only run programs like this on a read-only sector-level image of the damaged hard drive.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora