Do they make hard drives with built in speakers?

[andtomwares]

I know this may sound like a weird question but my friend says that they make hard drives with built in speakers that let you know if they are bad.

I know that they make a speaker on your motherboard to give you information if there is something wrong with it, but I have never heard of this being done in a hard drive.

I have tried to research this claim on the internet for some time and cant find any information on the subject.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Your post caught my eye....I believe what youre talking about is the beeps your system makes for system problems????

 

[mesarectifier]

I know for a fact that some Maxtor drives have error codes which are more akin to the death chimes of Macintoshes of yore than BIOS beeps. I don't think they've done it for a while, though. So your friend is sort of right, but other than Maxtor and for a short while, they don't make drives with speakers. It'd be more likely to be a piezo than a magnetic speaker though.

 

[tool_462]

I couldn't see a HDD company putting magnets anywhere near the plates of a drive But I do remember a drive in an old Hewlett Packard my parents had that had more of a whine than a beep if the IDE cable wasn't plugged in all the way or something.

 

[JonathanDeane]

Closest thing I can think off is that S.M.A.R.T thing they put on the drives its supposed to be sort of built in diagnostics and it will tell your BIOS if the drive is about to go bad, now if your BIOS has some sort of voice thing to go along with that (I know my ASUS bourd does) then that might do what your talking about (I would have to check mine to see if it can do that but even if it cant does not mean that none others do.)

 

[ir_efrem]

i have 2 scsi drives with a peizo electric speaker inside them

and they do indeed beep on error - even if its a controller card error, it beeps

of course not nearly as loud as a system speaker, and mabey its more of a blip instead of a beep .... but anyway

 

[JonathanDeane]

Well there you have it ! Thank you IR_Efrem thats interesting ! hmm I wonder if you could hack them to play some anoying tune while your PC boots up lol

 

[tool_462]

Sure you could! Just take a little scissors and cut your cables a bit I bet it would make a beep on boot up then...

 

[4745454b]

Heck no, do you have any idea how much SCSI cables cost???? No way I'd cut my or anyone else's cable.

 

[bliq]

I couldn't see a HDD company putting magnets anywhere near the plates of a drive But I do remember a drive in an old Hewlett Packard my parents had that had more of a whine than a beep if the IDE cable wasn't plugged in all the way or something.

Are you kidding? There;s a VERY strong magnet inside every hard drive. And when I mean strong, I mean STRONG!!!