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Comment by kayson | Hacker News Reader

These drives felt so amazing back then. I put two in RAID0 in the first PC I ever built and it seemed mind blowingly fast. Super expensive at the time compared to other storage, but it was the best you could get on consumer grade hardware (i.e. SATA). For some reason I feel more fondly about the Raptors than I do about my first SSD (an Intel X25-M). Maybe it's just age...

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I dunno.

Like, yeah, I get it. There‘s quite a few sounds that trigger emotional reactions in me.

The whirring and buzzing of the PSU. The Award BIOS beep. The seeking sound of an empty 3.5 inch disk drive. The slight CRT zang between different resolutions - and the electrical drizzle of degaussing such a beast.

But to this day nothing amazes me more than opening a MacBook and it being dead silent.

Maybe it‘s because I have young kids, maybe it‘s because I used to be an audio recording hobbyist (and isolating computer sound was always a pain).

But there‘s nothing I enjoy more than the powerful sound of silence.

It was fun reading your post but then I realized, what are you arguing against? The OP is just reflecting on fond memories like you are. Not saying anything about modern computers.

Can I have fond memories while also appreciate modern hardware? Or they're just mutually exclusive?

I didn't read their reply as merely responding to parent comment about being more fond of the 10k rpm drive than their first SSD, saying that they personally appreciated their first silent computer.

Like you said:

> The OP is just reflecting on fond memories like you are.

In fact, if you read it again, you'll see they are acknowledging the appeal and fondness for computer noises of old...

Speaking of dead silent, I had an old PowerEdge server that was anything but quiet, let alone silent. That thing sounded like a jet taking off! I had to wait for the wife and kids to leave before I could turn it on and start tinkering. It was real heavy and I would put it on the kitchen bar and hook up an old monitor to it and just geek out for a while.

If there's one thing I don't miss in computing, it's hard drives, especially the noise of hard drives. Clickety clickety. I associate it with my first "real" computer, which had 4MB of RAM and swapped constantly.

I know for me there’s something innately gratifying about the hardware actually becoming faster, not just the storage functions. It’s like a faster car, or some other machine actually doing whatever it does with more power and precision.

SSDs are totally better, yeah. But it’s also kind of boring from a mechanical perspective. Insanely beefy mechanical hard drives have a certain charm that SSDs will never have.

This sentiment also maps onto BEV and ICE for me. I love the utility, performance and efficiency of newer tech, but mechanical machines are far more awe inspiring to me. They're more organic somehow, even though that's the definition of an oxymoron. Haha.

Years ago I participated in a few adult LEGO robotics competitions with a group in Toronto, and one of the peculiarities about the Mindstorms kit was that each RCX (the control module) had just three motor outputs and three sensor inputs. So you could do a bit of hackery like doubling up your sensors, and obviously in the extreme case you could go multi-RCX and have them talk to each other over infrared.

But that constraint always really pushed people toward finding pure mechanical solutions to problems that in the real world would just be solved by slapping on another servo. One of my favourite examples was a single-motor steered castor, where a ratcheting mechanism switched between wheel driving and castor rotation based on which way you ran the motor.

I think another factor with it is just that LEGO makes the pursuit of a mechanism-type solution inexpensive, effortless, and fun, whereas in "real" industrial automation, every new gear or bearing is another point of failure, one more thing requiring lubrication check-ups and so on.

Yup, I have a model S and it's a great daily driver, but my dad's old foxbody is leagues and bounds more exciting to drive even though it's slower and way older.

I was still in college when the Raptor came out. I had an affluent friend who put two in RAID0 and I never saw Windows XP boot up so fast. He has some kind of solution rigged up for the noise so it was noticeable but pretty muffled. I was so jealous with my standard WD 7200 rpm drive.

The X25-M felt like I V8 swapped my 2006 MacBook. That thing was world changing. The 10k drives were fast, but for mostly laptop users the SSD was such a shift in speed it was uncanny.

+1. Made me realize that the processor and ram aren’t everything when it comes to a responsive system.

Having the operating system in ROM on an Atari helped a lot with boot times. Windows still has a bit left to boot times of old computers...

I still have one in my desktop computer that I built in 2012. I remember looking at how much better my 'windows experience' score was!

Now it's just a secondary storage drive that filled up pretty quickly. It felt good to say, "I'm running a 10K raptor."

Came here to make exactly this post. Thank you.

An SSD is soulless, a Veliciraptor was top of the line unicorn Mike beast of HDDs. I still habe one in my old Tower, happily running. Not even too noisy. Well, at least not if you don't use a SSD equppied machine when bo Fans are running as a comparison.

No idea what auto correct did with that post, I turned of everything I found that could effect the words I'm typing now so. Seems to be impossible to type regularly in thre languages otherwise on mobile...

same, I had these for a decade, and it was great. a little noisy, but I miss the trattatatatata of them seeking.

We got some giant disc drives in our office a while back and I hadn’t heard that sound in maybe a decade or more. It brought me back in a split second when I first heard it again, haha.

It’s incredibly nostalgic.

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