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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.
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!
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...
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
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.
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
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.
Like... BEFORE Halloween.
Some of the scariest sounds I've heard in years.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
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?
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