Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y160P0 hard drive sounds & Inside view

Volume was boosted by 12dB and the opened drive was recorded with my phone's mic

Just found out the HP machine I have actually isn't very noisy, pretty nice to record newer larger capacity drives and run a newer OS.
That machine is a Athlon XP 2600+ with 1.5GB of RAM and a FX 5200 GPU. Looks like the motherboard is not limiting the speed of faster drives like my Pentium and Pentium III boards do.

I ran Windows Vista because why not, and it obviously makes more seeking than XP does. Also while lots of people hated it, my first brand new laptop in the late 2000s had Vista on it and it was really nice. I never understood where the hate about it was coming from.
I used The Sims 2 as the game for more seeking, since that machine allows it to run, it is larger than SimCity 3000 so it should be better for higher capacity drives like this one.

As for the drives, the non-opened one is working totally fine with a single reallocated sector. The opened one on the other end has a lot of bad sectors which is why I opened it, and put the plastic piece that used to be on the opened Quantum. I made a 80GB partition in the area that is still fine. Its PCB also died, it actually was a SATA version originally (6Y160M0), but it works just fine with the PCB from an IDE one. The PCB I used in this video was the one from my 60GB version and it works on it... Usually people will say that drives are picky about the PCB especially newer ones, but it looks like DiamondMax plus 9s didn't care at all, grab a PCB from another DiamondMax plus 9 regardless of interface or capacity and it works. Well maybe that's not always true but it did work on that one at least.
I like these maxtors even if they are quite modern, they have a seektest that I like and still have seeking that is decently audible. Back when I started having internet in the late 2000s, I remember people talking about Maxtor drives very poorly. I don't know if they had an actual true reason for that or if they were just "haters", but regardless of if they are reliable or not, I like them.