Here is a better quality capture of the Seagate ST410800N 5 disk RAID set spinning up and spinning down. These are 5-1/4" full height drives.

RAID5 spinup & spindown

These are the sounds of a 5 disk RAID5 Array from 1996. 
Hardware setup:
system is booting from a 540Meg Western Digital Hard Drive which is running Windows NT4 SP4. 
RAID controller is a DEC/Mylex DAC960PD.
Disks in the RAID set are 5 x ST410800N 9GB disks for an approximate total of 35GB of storage space.

At the beginning of the track you can hear the PC system power on, the hard drive spin up and some fan noise.

I did it this way so that the listener can identify the different sounds from each of the different components.


Once the system POSTs, @~0:24 the DEC RAID controller spins and initializes the individual disks and this is when you can hear each disk drive start up individually. 

@~3:43 Windows NT4 finishes booting and the read/writes across the RAID array begin.

The read/writes continue until NT is commanded to shutdown which finishes @~10:00. The PC system then powers down. 

The loud click is the power supply for the RAID disks and you can hear them power off and spin to a stop.

I successfully recovered a full block image from this RAID set and was able to recover intact data dating from 1996. 

I hope you enjoy hearing the sounds of computing that were generally never heard by the masses. This technology is dying and  my goal with this recording is to preserve some of this experience for others.

think