Curiosity has gotten me

Why did hardrives make so much noise in the past?

I’ve been watching some videos on YouTube, and I just realized something. Today, if you have a HDD they’re more or less quiet.

But I remember even back in the day HDD’s used to be LOUD.

So my curiosity has picked up, anyone know why? I remember back in the day in the late 80’s/early 90’s hardrives used to be loud. I mean drive seeking used to have what I would describe today as grinding sounds. Now I know in today’s hard drives that’s a bad sound. But back when I was a kid, I remember walking into a computer lab and all you could hear were the computers all clicking and grinding away as people were accessing stuff.

Why was that? Anyone have an answer that makes sense?

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Very old hard drives used stepper motors that drove a rack and pinion mechanism to move the head back and forth; steppers without fairly sophisticated drivers are insanely loud because they just blast full current into the motor coil to make it move to the next increment, then blast full current into the “next” motor coil to get the stepper to increment again, as you’d expect this can create mechanical and inductive harmonics/noise.
I wasn’t very knowledgeable back in those days so I’m not sure if microstepping stepper motor drivers ever made it to hdds from the era to quiet them down.

Eventually hhds went to just a voice coil to move the head around and became fairly quiet; but even a modern 3.5" hdd will produce a satisfying clicking noise during seeks, just not very loud.

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Even data center drives are not very loud these days. I personally currently use 4 of these for long term storage.

If you want a lot of storage space that is reliable as anything available, these are the way to go. For a lot of reasons, get the 16TB (or larger) drives. They often go on sale and you can get pretty good pricing on them.

Yes 64TB of space might seem like a lot, but it fills up faster than you might think. especially when you start transferring your movie and television show collections to them. Or if you decide to have duplication systems in case of failure.

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I have fond memories of my old Maxtor grinding away for years…
These days I’m a fan of using one WD and one Seagate when I mirror things, Red Pro and Ironwolf Pro to avoid any SMR bullcrap. I get nervous when I have same model from the same manufacturing lot.

And for me, 22TB would have uncomfortably long rebuild time to only use 4 disks.

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It is true, the larger the drive gets, the longer recovery can take. I personally always want my drives to use HelioSeal tech. It’s a reliability thing…

Here’s the brochure going over the helium filled drive tech if you are curious about it.

Unfortunately you only get HelioSeal in the larger drives these days. Used to be you could get 8TB drives with HelioSeal, but now it’s only 12TB and above I think.

So you could go with the 12TB drives too, I thought it was 16TB and up last time I ordered… keeps changing.

From what I understand HelioSeal was developed and first used in science labs (observatories) for increased reliability and vibration reduction. (you can’t have a bunch of hard drives vibrating away near sensitive scientific instruments!) I have a couple old 8TB drives from way back that are still ticking along quite well that were some of the early HelioSeal drives. I think they are also used by NASA in some space missions.

The tech is only used in the larger/more expensive drives, so not many people know about it. That’s why I like to mention it when I get an excuse. It’s a good advancement in the HDD space.

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I like 6-8TB and I go with 16 for non critical stuff, such as movie collection.

Backblaze has great stats for drive failure rates and according to them, humble Seagate Desktop 6TB drive is the best HDD ever.

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You got me thinking of old drives I have kicking around still in-use. My oldest one in a functional computer is this one Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 36.7GB 10000 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive - Newegg.com

One of the early WD Raptor drives, it still works great. crazy sometimes how long these things can last.

Not my oldest drive by far, but the oldest one still in-service.

My oldest one is one of these…
Comodore 64 Tape Drive
Gosh that takes me back. I still have a tape with the Conan the Barbarian game on it.

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Back when the hellium filled drives just started appearing I was super paranoid about the helium leaking out and the drive becoming unreliable… turns out they were reliable after all, I’ve got a bunch of >10 year old 8TB WD helium drives still running.
Now I’m semi-paranoid about the energy assisted recording heads in the new >~20TB drives… time will tell how reliable these are.

On another note, my go-to hdds right now are the toshiba MG08’s because they have an order of magnitude lower read error rate than “other” hdds because they have multiple domain pickups within the head.

Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording brochure:
https://storage.toshiba.com/docs/enterprise-hdd-documents/201907_nearlinehdd_16tb_e.pdf

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Even though this has nothing to do with HDD’s, I cannot resist to post this clip which is a clever assembly of old school stepper noise:

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I am sad they don’t make a lot of noise anymore.

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I bought two drives from the batch some years ago, both of them failed after 2 years of usage, within a timespan of 2-3 weeks. Lots of data gone, and I felt that I don’t trust seagate anymore.

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Haha! I saw a thing about those recently. Maybe I should get one and rig it into my A1200.

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Yeah, same thing happened to me, but I was lucky to have external backup. Since then I always go for different manufacturers in the same array.

It however may or may not have anything to do with real life. Some claim you have same batch of actuators or lubricant or whatever that fails at roughly the same time, others claim it has to do with drives working in the same environment and are subjected to same vibrations and temperatures and that is causing them to wear out in roughly the same way. Probably a little bit of both.

In fact someone who asked me for help years ago got their ass saved by not using all WD drives.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/post-your-tech-cringe-gore/113501/5116?u=vivante

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I don’t think Nasa brings Hhds up in to space. I think even the first missions used solid state something.

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Not to make fun of this statement at all, but solid state drives have not been around that long. For example, this came up with a very simple search which talks about hard drives with platters being recovered from the space shuttle columbia crash.

Hard drives have played (and are still contributing) a very important role in space missions, and quite a few hard drives are still in service on various satellites, probes, rovers, etc.

Assuming that we have always had solid state drives is like assuming that the internet existed for all of human history (hint - it hasn’t)

    • (in before the next reply pops up) - Here’s a useful blurb from an article on the subject.

"The use of flash memory for longer-term storage has been around since the 1950s, but those solutions were generally in mainframes or larger minicomputers. They also required battery backups to preserve the contents of the memory when the machine was not powered by the host, as those solutions used volatile memory.

Since then, the technology has gotten smaller and faster, and it no longer requires battery backup. Performance has skyrocketed too, as new PC bus interfaces have made it possible for data transfer rates to far exceed the standard rates that traditional spinning media would saturate. They’re also less expensive today, even compared to the first SSD drive released in 1991 — a 20MB SSD that sold for $1,000."

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To be fair, solid state storage has been around longer than rotating magnetic platter storage (hdds).

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Solid state memory storage (that did not require power to maintain it’s stored data) was invented in 1980.

Magnetic tape storage by comparison was invented in 1921. (precursors to magnetic disk based storage systems)

So unless you are counting things like paper punch cards, no - solid state storage was not around before magnetic storage.

Source wikipedia (I know, wikipedia is rife with errors…)
and this site…

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We had non-volatile magnetic core memory (the cool woven looking stuff) back in early 50’s. it wasn’t until the mid 50’s that rotating platter hdds came into being.

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Tape drives (magnetic based storage) were in-use prior to that, the basis for storage that is useful requires a medium that can be used to store data while the computer has no power, so it can be reset, or turned off, and restarted, yet still maintain it’s data.

Ahh - you mean this stuff. Yerp, that was mid 1950’s. pretty fun looking stuff.

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