The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives

Slashdot.org has an article about a site that is hosting the sounds of thirty five different hard drives failing. Although the recording quality is generally poor there are some really interesting sounds including a Maxtor drive with a stuck spindle producing a “futuristic cell phone melody”. You can read the article and checkout the sounds here, although it might be a bit busy due to the site being slashdotted.

Also, click the image to see a video of a remix of Nude by Radiohead made entirely out of sounds captured from old computer peripherals including a dot matrix printer, scanner, cassette drive, hard drives, and so on. The remix and video was created by Glasgow based artist James Houston.