Hard Drives' Dying Moans
From a repair shop comes a collection of the sounds of hard drives failing. Their last words, their dying moans.
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin-it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring. -- S. J Perelman
These are noises that will please the ears of circuit benders everywhere. I kind of like the Maxtor drive "with stuck spindle and musical siren." Kind of like a John Cage piece.
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Okay, who else clicked on as many as they could to hear a strange symphony of hard-drive death?
Of relevance: Hitachi Hard-Drive Project - Noriko Version. A contest was held to remix the sounds of a dying hard drive into music. This was the winner.
http://odeo.com/episodes/632955
"Okay, who else clicked on as many as they could to hear a strange symphony of hard-drive death?"
That's exactly what I did!
I've heard many o' maxtor squeal, click and die...
gawd, maxtors are the worst - i have a stack of dead maxtors - but all my old western digitals work fine still pretty much, but LaCie seems to be the most Mac friendly nowadays...
There was a competition, a year or two ago, to take some recordings of failing drives and remix them into musical tracks. Some were surprisingly good.
I found some of 'em at http://odeo.com/episodes/632933
Technogeek, Glottis--thanks a ton.
I believe that competition was actually featured on boing a few years ago. I had that winning track--it's awesome--but lost it when that computer bit the dust and it wasn't backed up.
I had found it probably 2 years ago again via google, but the goddamn only link I could find was busted!
So yeah, thanks.
For a more avant-garde treatment, allow me to recommend Jin Sangtae's Extensity of Hard Disk Drive, a fascinating album on the Balloon & Needle label.
I had to stop halfway through the list; many of those sounds are all too familiar to me, and I was starting to feel nauseated as memories of past data loss floated to the surface.
Funny! I've been collecting clicking and scratching "dead" harddrives for this very purpose. Many make amazing rhythmic noises (and all garner a sense of dread).
Heh...I played a few and had to keep telling myself over and over again that it was just a recording, that the sound wasn't actually going to damage my own hard drive. I gave up. This gave me more creeps than a ghost story.