An old HDD and some nostalgia: an engineer recreated the sounds and visualization of defragmentation in a browser

Modern computers and laptops are mostly equipped only with silent solid-state drives. HDDs are rarely seen in mass devices nowadays. Along with hard drives, the process of HDD defragmentation, accompanied by characteristic sounds, has become a thing of the past. But if someone misses this "crackling" and wants to reminisce about the good old days, there is a quite unconventional solution.

For this, there is no need to search for an old hard drive, connect it to the system, and run defragmentation. Engineer Dennis Morello has recreated the experience of defragmenting the C drive in Windows 98. You can run it in your browser right now.

"One of the biggest challenges was integrating an actual defragmentation algorithm that would seem authentic," Morello wrote.

The special algorithm he came up with randomly chooses how many clusters to process simultaneously and adjusts the speed depending on which imaginary disk you select, from C to F. They have different capacities. The longest process takes about 17 minutes.

To create the appropriate sound effects, Morello recorded the actual "crackle" sounds of a hard drive and edited them. The sound effects are synchronized with the visualizer and change according to the selected disk speed. It turned out quite accurate and can remind users of how things were in 1998.

Source: pcgamer