It also works the other way around: sound will make harddrives malfunction.

This means that one could theoretically use a harddrive as a microphone!

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 for a demo, yelling at harddrives increases their latency.

For a brief second I thought your link was the Radiohead cover that used old computer equipment, including hard drives as speakers. Here’s that link: https://youtu.be/pmfHHLfbjNQ

Thanks for sharing that! I had forgotten that Radiohead help a competition to remix Nude. Interesting tidbit from the YouTube summary:

Radiohead held an online contest to remix "Nude" from their album - "In Rainbows" This was quite a difficult task for everybody that entered, as Nude is in 6/8 timing, and 63bpm. Most music that's played in clubs is around 120bpm and usually 4/4 timing...

...I decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit. Based on the lyric (and alternate title) "Big Ideas: Don't get any" I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they're trying their best to do something that they're not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there. It doesn't sound great, as it's not supposed to.

I personally disagree and think it sounds awesome but I get what he means.

You know how some electric cars create fake engine noise at low speeds to avoid sneaking up on pedestrians?

I wish that was an option with SSDs. A little speaker included with the package that I could toggle on. All it does it make fake HDD sounds. Bonus if those sounds match the underlying logical distance and “shape” of the read/write activity.

I wonder if one could make something driven purely by the diskactivity LED that's mildly convincing

Seems like a quirky-fun sorta project!

If you've got an SSD connected by a power cord, presumably you could insert an electric-current-meter to see how much power it's drawing, then hook up a speaker to make corresponding sounds.

Maybe also put a temperature probe inside of the SSD's box (perhaps directly on a controller-IC?), then another probe just outside of the SSD's box (or inside of it, but away from the controller-IC?), then use that temperature difference too?

A software solution would probably be easier, but then you'd have to trust the system to give correct information, which I guess would defeat the point.

Someone who'd really want to go at this might make their own controller to place between the motherboard and SSD. But unless it's passive/transparent, allowing the normal SSD driver to be used, that'd seem to require writing a driver for the controller too.

Might still be working https://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/

Could be a fun little utility that produces magnetic HDD sounds when doing SSD IO.

I've slowly been moving all my classic machines over to solid state storage and the lack of sound does take something away.

I wonder if you could design something to sit inline on an IDE connection and emulate hard disk sounds in relation to read/write workloads...

Or maybe some software that can watch for unusual behavior and throw up an alert.