Bring that retro hard drive clicking sound back into your life with this little device
Close your eyes and cast your mind back. Back to the sounds of your first gaming PC, and the noises emanating from its beautiful, beige (was it once white?) case. The gentle whirr of the fans, the bell-chime boot sound that welcomes you into a vast, digital world, and falling asleep to the incessant clicking of a merry, overnight defrag. Oh, the nostalgia.
If you’re having a hard week, or just fancy a little blast from the past, the HDD Clicker will let you enjoy the sounds of a spinning platter—even as the age of the hard disk wanes (opens in new tab).
We’ve been discovering the ins and outs of the HDD Clicker from Arne Schmitz of Root42 (via PC Watch (opens in new tab)). He’s dedicated to retro gaming and tinkering with old tech, and explains that the device is meant for retro gaming builds to simulate the noise of a hard disk.
“A lot of the old hard drives have failed, they’re cumbersome, they’re loud, they’re slow. So usually what we do nowadays: we take compact flash cards instead of hard disks. The advantage here being that many of these are more or less compatible to regular old ATA hard disks because it’s basically the same interface.”
He makes it clear that’s not always the case, but the main takeaway is that just because the HDD is pretty much defunct doesn’t mean you should be robbed of the joys of the hard drive ASMR as you use your device. This way, you’ll also be sure never to be subject to what Arne calls the “Dreaded clicks of death when the hard disk was dying.”
The device was designed by matze79 who posted their development on the Vogons forum (opens in new tab). The final design, now available on Serdashop (opens in new tab) is “directly pluggable on HDD molex power” according to dreamblaster, who helped matze79 make their design a reality.
The HDD Clicker is, by default, set to high volume Quantum mode, but the listing says you can “put some tape on the buzzer hole” for Medium volume LGR mode, or on the speaker directly for a Low volume modern HDD mode.
While writing this, I’m happy to say I rediscovered the soothing sounds of the PCs of old and am now on a bit of an ASMR journey. Now, I understand why people enjoy the nostalgic click of a HDD, or even tactile button clicking ASMR (opens in new tab), but much of the ASMR landscape (even those related to gaming PCs) still makes me rather uncomfortable (opens in new tab). Maybe, I’ll just stick to falling asleep to a little defrag.
