For your listening (dis)pleasure: Hard drives on the fritz

Now this is scary: An audio library of the various clicks, clacks, knocks and sweeps that you'll hear from a dying hard drive. Not for the faint of heart.

Canadian data recovery firm Datacent (by way of Slashdot and CrunchGear) has more than two dozen audio snippets of damaged hard drives that'll make your hair stand on end—especially if you've ever lost everything after a hard drive failure.

Full disclosure: A couple of years ago, the hard drive in my PowerBook G4 up and died, leaving me with nothing but an awful, "click ... click ... click" sound, over and over. Luckily, I had a week-old DVD backup on hand, but I still lost a good chuck of my data—hence my freak-out upon listening to some of these clips.

Anyway, sound samples from flailing Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, and Hitachi drives are available, and they run the gamut from beeping and scratching to rattles, "squeals," clanks, and even sirens. The culprits? Bad heads and stuck spindles seem to be the main offenders, followed by "degraded" media and bad bearings.

The whole point of the Datacent audio library is to self-diagnose your busted hard drive and send in the results for a quote—but personally, I found myself playing the various clips purely out of morbid curiosity.

Which reminds me: You're backing up your desktop/laptop daily, right? If not, here's some tips on how to save yourself—and your data—from some serious misery.

Related:
The horrifying sounds of broken hard drives [CrunchGear]