Newer drives intentionally lower the armature/actuator speed to decrease noise, which can sometimes affect drive performance, but to be honest, I kind of miss hearing the click-click-click of the days of old. Besides, if you can't hear the drive, it also means you can't hear the drive failing; the noise produced by most hard drives is meaningful and useful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-VBlLuDic&NR=1

I want to see some defragging going on.

And here's another video showing how much abuse a hard drive can take and still not give up trying to do work ("Get those files copied over or die trying").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kdjEWh2RVo

This post has been edited by dserban: Sep 4 2007, 12:22 PM

My parents always tell me that the quiet drives are beautiful, but they don't see the technical standpoint. A quiet drive means it's dead. I actually want a drive that's not too loud but not to the point you can't hear the drive spin or click.

xboxrulz

Man, that dude who tested his Hard Disk Drive's limits must be nuts. I've always treated the so called 'Hard' disks with extreme care. To see someone pound the poor thing like that, makes me sad. Surely, the disk could have been put into better use than starring in a 4 star youtube video.

sometimes you have to do such things with old hardware, otherwise keeping old stuff isn't fun anymore . Nothing more fun than trashing old motherboards, smashing an old, useless LCD screen, dismanteling a dead hdd (using an EXTREME amount of force ).
I sometimes do miss the real clicking sound of 3 500Mb HDDs working at the same time, but on the other hand I probably wouldn't be able to work as long as I can do now (don't forget these old hdds had very noisy ball bearings, producing the most annoying high pitched sounds). A light, ticking sound is the best for me, it's not annoying, but at least you know when your computer is slowing down due to a lot of hdd activity.

I collect all types of PC hardware for those rainy days and now I know why i saved those redundant HDD`s.
Iv`e got a couple of 1GB HHD`s and always wanted to know what was inside so next chance I get those babies are gonna get stripped!!! and used on a working platform.
I`ll even do a defrag.....

Thanks guys