Disk Failure

A song about my failing hard drive

Disk Failure - Dev Talk

A song about my failing hard drive

A few months ago I was happily using my pc until it suddenly decided to become incredibly slow. I had no idea what was going on because my web browser would run fine, but opening FL Studio (or even file explorer) would cause my pc to freeze.

I looked up a disk checker to see whether anything was wrong with my hard drives, and the culprit was unfortunately the one that stored all my music projects. It had 1 terabyte of storage and it felt like it never ran out of space. I didn’t think it’d stop working this soon, but looking back on it I should’ve known due to it being an old 2nd hand drive.

It made me discover this disk checking tool called “Crystal Disk Info” though; it has an anime girl on it that changes expression depending on the disk’s status!! Technology sure is amazing.

Concept

This whole situation gave me an idea, which was using floppy disk noises in a song! I browsed my folders for any audio files that sounded similar to floppy drives, and chopped them up into a bassline. The entire song is built around that floppy noise section.

Initially, this project went a much more bass heavy and distorted route. It was difficult to mix and it felt out of place, so I tried to focus on creating more interesting sound design instead. So staying in the “disk” theme I took a random song on my disk and used it to create something new. The track I used was “Sunnexo - Aimbot” with a ton of editing + post processing, and if you listen closely at 0:46 you might be able to hear it!

Artwork

I wanted to experiment a little bit with this song’s artwork. It’s the first time I tried doing vector art! I got a ton of help from @chocographix and @Stellazium. That makes this a three way collab!

Written by @chocographix

Inspired by old floppy disk packages, I mixed in various elements from the analog and digital world. Implementing a simplified isometric floppy disk with a funky Sunnexo sticker on it from the real world worked pretty well when I started putting in some things that also referred to the song, like the infamous text "To skip disk checking, press any key within 5 second(s)" that appeared on old windows computers if your disk was corrupted.

To give the cover art a slight more feeling of a proper packaging, me and Sunnexo added a fake obi-strip at the bottom that can primarily be found on Japanese products like books, cardboard software boxes or CDs. I also added the "lyrics" on it and metadata like key and BPM. To finish the whole thing off, I put in a 3D grid to enhance the focus point and add a slight touch of depth to it.

The colors were chosen pretty quick from a real floppy disk and the soft red still draws attention while not being too bright or intense. I even put a "test print color palette" at the bottom right of the obi-strip :)

Conclusion

At the end of the day, I browsed the entirety of tech support reddit hoping to find a way to restore my drive. I was extremely lucky and found a cmd command that managed to get my drive working again. It was just a temporary fix but it bought me enough time to backup all important files!

The whole Disk Failure project wouldn’t exist if that disk hadn’t exploded on me.

Disk failed succesfully.