Bring that retro hard drive clicking sound back into your life with this little device
Fancy a little retro PC ASMR?
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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 asthe age of the hard disk wanes.
We’ve been discovering the ins and outs of the HDD Clicker from Arne Schmitz of Root42 (viaPC Watch). 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 theVogons forum. The final design, now available onSerdashopis “directly pluggable on HDD molex power” according to dreamblaster, who helped matze79 make their design a reality.
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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.
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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 eventactile button clicking ASMR, but much of the ASMR landscape (even those related to gaming PCs) still makes me ratheruncomfortable. Maybe, I’ll just stick to falling asleep to a little defrag.
Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she’s waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.
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