Yep - the happy noises and a flickering HDD LED were the key signs it was still chugging away.

If the drive was silent and/or the LED was solid on, probably time for a reboot.

I replaced 4x4TB disks with a 10T helium drive, and was shocked at the noise it made.

The build went from nearly silent to keep my wife up at night.

There is a certain thunk-thunk-thunk sound they make, which was awful, but I'm almost positive the 10T disk managed to resonate through the front panel and use it to make itself known. I don't think I can blame the disk for that second part.

I love that many of those sounds are still used in in modern movies. The seek sounds seem to particularly popular when in a NOC or during a hacking scene.

The best part is that I'm pretty sure the audio samples typically come from truly ancient full-height 5¼" stepper motor based drives.[0] The advent of voice coil actuated heads seriously helped quite hard drives.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNSEfgESF_k

I don't know what the point of recording all of these was when the person recording it noisily breathes or sharply inhales during several of them. It was probably a lot of effort to record all of these but it's sad to see that effort go to waste because of a bad recording setup.