I actually recently switched from my laptop to my desktop as my main work machine, and due to some weird partition choices previously (long story), I temporarily ended up with my /home/<work_user> directory on a btrfs filesystem that's sitting on top of 3 Seagate Exos 20TB drives (instead of my main NVMe).
Hearing the drives has been really nice actually, and got me noticing all kinds of interesting and sometimes unexpected behavior going on with my system, and actually helped find a bug with my terminal multiplexer.
With 64GB of RAM my entire home directory fits, so only writes go to the drives, and it's been surprisingly performant for my workloads.
On old PCs drive activity indicator LEDs (good) or drive mechanism sounds (better) were always a great way to build an intuitive feeling for what your computer was doing. People who got into PCs in the post-SSD world have no idea how the sounds act as a window into the computer's operation.
This kind of intuition goes back a long time, too. Levy's "Hackers" describes the MIT TX-0 having a CPU register connected a speaker and the hackers who programmed the machine being able to suss out how their program was doing by the sounds the machine was making. Indeed, that's closer to the "metal" of the machine than disk activity sounds.
The closest thing we have today are the fans throttling-up like jet engines, but by the time that happens things have usually gone well and truly off the rails and it's just an indication of "all hell is breaking loose w/ your CPU".
I am all for building sonification tools. It is a long standing idea of our IT department and me to build some sort of university wide network traffic sonification tool. But today given the amounts of data and the speed involved you can only abstract it down.
So the major task will be drinking from the waterhose and having something useful fall out on the other side.
Growing up with those beige deeping beasts I always remember the activity indicators going wild. They also seemed to make more noise during HDD activity.
The drive mechanism sounds were they just louder back then or? You can put a HDD in a PC and it won't make the same grinding noises the old ones used to
After 17 years of existance one would assume they have fixed all major flaws. Anyone knows why raid is still broken on btrfs? And what is the next fs after zfs and btrfs? There should be a major contender by now, but I see none.
Haaa, they will figure out to sell that too. Buy, “The new AI-powered disc audio based off the standard high-quality analog technology of the early hard drives, that will make your computer perform 4X better at 1/3rd the price.”
I've been reliving the good old days to a limited extent -- I recently bought a Synology NAS, and before I move it out to the server cabinet, I have it sitting on my desk. How quickly I forgot how loud hard drives are. At least these drives are (16TB Seagate Ironwolf).
I want something like this built in to perhaps a little microcontroller module in my system so that from the moment of boot it sounds like a 1980's Macintosh. I thought of running a Macintosh emulator on a raspberry pi as a simple computer for writing, but one thing it would lack by default is hard drive sounds from boot (even if I ran this program after boot).
I would be fine with silence if modern systems were engineered to give timely notification of liveliness (vs press button, wait 30 seconds to see if it did anything, press a bit longer...)
I ran a BBS off an 80mb (huge!) drive with bad sticktion back in the day. Worked great because it never spun down by being on for the BBS, so mostly avoided clanging platters. It made a lot of unholy noises. Things kids today will never understand.
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Hearing the drives has been really nice actually, and got me noticing all kinds of interesting and sometimes unexpected behavior going on with my system, and actually helped find a bug with my terminal multiplexer.
With 64GB of RAM my entire home directory fits, so only writes go to the drives, and it's been surprisingly performant for my workloads.
This kind of intuition goes back a long time, too. Levy's "Hackers" describes the MIT TX-0 having a CPU register connected a speaker and the hackers who programmed the machine being able to suss out how their program was doing by the sounds the machine was making. Indeed, that's closer to the "metal" of the machine than disk activity sounds.
The closest thing we have today are the fans throttling-up like jet engines, but by the time that happens things have usually gone well and truly off the rails and it's just an indication of "all hell is breaking loose w/ your CPU".
So the major task will be drinking from the waterhose and having something useful fall out on the other side.
The drive mechanism sounds were they just louder back then or? You can put a HDD in a PC and it won't make the same grinding noises the old ones used to
RAID 1 or 0 is just as a good idea as ever.
I do something like this, https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/What_was_the_RAID...
Basically, mdadm, then on top, format with BTRFS
These eclectic sounds are for a certain types of individuals and there is no quantifiable commercial value for search engine juice.
Thank you for the audio.