40 different sounds of failing hard drives

Not that I lie awake at night thinking of this, but do hard drives make different sounds as they begin to fail -- and take your precious data with them? Apparently, they do.

Datacent Data Recovery, a Canadian-based firm, decided to record the myriad of sounds that broken drives made as they spun them up in their labs and attempted to recovery data from them.

I always thought failing hard drives typically made that whirring, clicking sound as their heads could no longer read bad sectors and their spindles ground to a halt. That was bad enough. But, in fact, it seems some disk drive manufacturers decided to add musical melodies their drives to serenade us at the time of our worst digital misery.

For example, Maxtor's desktop drive plays a futuristic cell phone sound when its spindle gets stuck. Then you have Seagate's Momentus laptop drive, which makes a nasty drilling noise when its heads go bad. Hitachi's laptop drive clicks once on spinup then beeps when its head goes bad. And, Samsung's desktop drive makes a scratching sound when hitting bad sectors.

Not that it'll be music to you ears, but take a listen and perhaps next time you hear one of these sounds, there'll no longer be any question about what just happened to your computer.