The small dongle brings back the song from the hard disk to the updated retro-computers

In the days of the "beige box" of computing, it was pretty easy to tell what your machine was doing just by listening to it, because the hard drive was constantly bouncing around. It was annoying at times, but never so annoying as hearing the Geiger counter-like stream of clicks stop when you knew a program hadn't finished loading yet.

That "cheerful sound" is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve, even on retro machines, whose original thrash-o-matic discs have increasingly been replaced by compact flash discs and other solid state drives. This HDD sound simulator aims to fill that diagnostic and nostalgic gap on any machine that isn't clicky enough for you. Unfortunately [Matthias Werner] doesn't provide any build details for his creation, but between the long demo video below (by a happy customer) and the first build details, it's pretty easy to see what's going on here. An ATtiny and some supporting components mount on a small PCB with a piezoelectric speaker. The dongle connects to the hard drive activity light, which triggers a series of speaker clicks that sound remarkably like a hard drive title searching for tracks. A demo starts at 7:09 in the video below; the bravest - or the most nostalgic - might want to check out the full defrag that starts at 1:11 p.m.

Sure, this one might be a bit of a stretch, but in the world of retro computing, no price is too high to pay in the name of nostalgia. And it's still far from the most ridiculous hard drive activity indicator we've seen.

Thanks to [maciek84] for the advice.