The Sound of the SE's Hard Drive

[Maniacintosh]

Chances are you've heard it. UUUU--UUscht--RRRUUK-*Beep*--RUTCH!!

What does the sound of the infamous MiniScribe HD remind you most of? Yeah, this is a geeky thread, but this is also a geeky forum.

 

[coius]

I vote for angry birds. Unless it starts belching smoke, then I would say diesel

 

[Maniacintosh]

I left my SE unused for two months so it had to run the HD for a while before it would mount and it made horrible screeching noises!!!

 

[funkytoad]

Like The macintosh Classic II, Let it sit for a while then the speaker make a horrible horrible noise!

 

[bluekatt]

from the description id say a smokers cough

 

[MacMan]

I had an external 20MB drive that made an aweful noise once, then went "pop" and slightly caught fire! Don't entirely know what happened there but it seems that the damage was isolated to the drive itself and the enclosure was fine. In went a much bigger SCSI drive!

I still use the fried 20MB drive as a paperweight, doorstop etc.

 

[bluekatt]

slightly caught fire ?

how slight is slight ?

 

[MacMan]

Well, smoke came from inside and there was a small lick of flame visible through the vent at the back. However that only lasted a second or two and (thankfully) went out.

 

[wgoodf]

I left my SE unused for two months so it had to run the HD for a while before it would mount and it made horrible screeching noises!!!

my drive is a bit flaky - i am always happy to hear it make any noise on switch on.

 

[~llama]

My SE SuperDrive's hard disk makes this sound: " ."

Mainly because it won't spin up, and the access light stays on, leaving me with a high density floppy-driven Mac with only 1MB of RAM. Which sucks.

I'd trade a loud hard drive noise for my Classic II's teapot-whistle act though.

 

[MacG4]

mine sounds more like a floppy drive than a hd

 

[coius]

Well, smoke came from inside and there was a small lick of flame visible through the vent at the back. However that only lasted a second or two and (thankfully) went out.

Hehe I can top THAT!!

I had a DVD-ROM IDE Drive that BLEW UP inside the case. It exploded taking out a bracket and the disc in the drive (a windows XP Pro disc nonetheless, thank you M$ for sending me a free disc )

When it blew up, it embeded a piece of plasting into the wire harness that went to the motherboard. Talk about scary! [:O] ]'>

 

[Charlieman]

When new, I didn't think that an SE with MiniScribe disk was all that noisy. Third party disks (eg SuperMac and Rodime) were equally noisy, as were PC/XT/AT hard disks. The later Sony disks used in the SE family were quieter, but they had an impressive failure rate (an Apple recall) and Sony never made another hard disk.

For shear noise, I'll vote for the Seagate ST506 family used in Profile drives.

 

[FunnymanSE30]

Ahh... The bliss of using a Plus, just the very faint electrical buzz of the CRT.

 

[IPNixon]

Not having an SE with an internal HD, I voted for Angry Birds, 'cause it's the funniest.

Seriously, though, I did get to try one with an HD at one point -- it did sound something like that.

 

[MacMan]

It is amazing hw different some SCSI hard drives can sound. My Performa 475 once had a really quiet 250MB one which I replaced with a 1GB Seagate because I needed the space. The Seagate sounds like a jet aircraft powering up! The 250MB quiet drive is now being used in an external case with my Plus. The one in my SE/30 sounds like it is about to take off as well!

 

[Scott Baret]

It sounds like my freshman year of high school.

A bit of a story on this one. I took geography that year and we generated a ton of paperwork in the class. Rather than spend a ton of money on Epson Stylus Color 740 cartridges (which I already used for other stuff) I did all the work on a Mac SE with Word 5.1 and an ImageWriter II. The SE had a 20MB MiniScribe (and a FDHD drive as a bonus) and I used that particular computer the entire first half of my freshman year (before swapping out for another SE that had a 40MB drive...needed a bigger disk for the work I was generating and programs I was running!)

I loved the first half of my freshman year of high school--great people, great times, great hard drives. Whenever I hear one I think back on that time. I remember coming home to it after chilling with my buddies all day. Classes were easy, life was good.

 

[onlyonemac]

I don't have an SE, but performa's drive sounds different to the PC's drive (before the performa broke xx( ).

It sounded more like a concantenated series of rapid clicks-probably the noise of a fast stepper motor. Todays faster motors are quieter!

The drive still spins up, but won't stay like that. Nevertheless it still sounds like a concantenated series of rapid clicks (search: "Can dead battery cause hard disk troulbe").

 

[Mk.558]

Five years...Well, I've seen six year necroposts...Or was it seven? It was positively shocking, to say the least.