What does that sound mean?

Published on January 19th, 2009

Published on June 28th, 2010

Bang, bang, bang, click, click, click, scrape, scrape, scrape and ping, ping, ping! These are some of the sounds people have tried to describe to me while talking about the weird noises they hear coming out of their computer case.

Well, usually only two things would make such a noise, most probably, one of the fans in the computer. Fans can be found in the power supply, on top of the processor, on video cards, and throughout the case for cooling.

Tech tips - Bang, bang, bang, click, click, click, scrape, scrape, scrape and ping, ping, ping! These are some of the sounds people have tried to describe to me while talking about the weird noises they hear coming out of their computer case.

Well, usually only two things would make such a noise, most probably, one of the fans in the computer. Fans can be found in the power supply, on top of the processor, on video cards, and throughout the case for cooling.

The other source of those strange noises would most likely be from the moving parts in a failing hard drive. This brings me to the topic of this week's column, the evolution of solid state drives.

Have you ever looked at your little USB (thumb flash) drive and wondered why someone didn't just make a hard drive out of the same stuff? This is kind of the idea behind solid state drives (SSD) that are starting to enter the general consumer market.

Although still more expensive than regular hard drives, they seem to be following the normal evolution path as most other technology, getting better and cheaper with each generation.

Many manufactures are offering SSDs as an option. You can for example, purchase a 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro with a 128GB SSD instead of its 320GB Serial ATA drive for a mere $450 extra. Or, preorder the 17-inch MacBook Pro with the 250GB SSD for an additional $850 as compared to the normal 320 ATA. Can anyone say sticker shock?

Other manufactures offer other variations of SSD at varying sizes and prices. They are designed to work with your existing computer or laptop. And, like you would expect, price adjustments and dependability will occur as the technology becomes more adopted.

I am not going to list the advantages and disadvantages of this technology except to say that "no moving parts" is a very attractive feature. Watch for SSD to be widely adopted!

One final thing, I have to tell you about a website. Check out datacent.com . These guys have listed common sounds of failing hard drives by manufacture. Click the sound link and you can actually listen to the sounds that a bad hard drive makes. See if that matches the sound coming out of your box.

toddmusseau@gmail.com