Re: This was my grandfather's HDD.
"Kalok, right? Both the name of the brand, and the sound they would make when it broke..."
I bought a Kalok drive in the 90's. When I loaded a beta version of Win '95 it started swapping to disk a LOT, which caused the drive to eat itself. Sounded a lot like breaking glass.
(fortunately, I did regular backups, and only lost time and the cost of a new hard drive)
Prior to that, I had left a Seagate drive on top of the case, with extended length IDE+power cables going into the back of the computer (a secondary hard drive). I stored "work files" on it, mostly (whatever I was working on at the time, source code etc.) and did regular backups. But whenever the drive had been off for a while, after being on for a while, it wouldn't spin up. But the spindle stuck out through the circuit board, just a little. So I'd grab it with pliers and manually spin it until it free'd up, then power up the drive. It worked for about a year like this until I finally replaced it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
