[Smushman]

I recall the Apple II+ floppy drive would produce all kinds of choking, strangling, and coughing sounds when playing those copy protected games. When I got my next computer, my first Mac, I remember my shock at the silence of the floppy drive. Many times I thought it was broken (and since they were so slow to load, you had to 'wait it out' to be sure).

[incepted]

Those noises didn't come from copy protections.

Copy protections access the drive in much the same way as a regular RWTS, even those protections based on physical features (e.g. spirals). I'm not aware of any copy protection based on fast and wide movements of the reading head. Copy protections read nibbles normally, they just process these nibbles differently from regular disks.

The noises you remember are most likely from the boot sequence which reset the head 100 tracks or so (so much more than needed) and as a consequence, that head would butt against some internal mechanism.

I've never quite understood why it did that myself. Regular disks have 35 tracks so moving the head 36 tracks should have been enough to reset.

[StillBored]

IIRC, they did that to save a few cents on a track/head sensor. So they just did exactly what you stated they seeked a whole disk's worth of tracks, even when the head was already there (but there wasn't a good way to find that out except by trying to read the disk, which was slow).

Of course none of this helped by how loud the drive was just seeking.

[acomjean]

There was a beagle bros software in their silicon salad collection that would alternative spin drives (on a two drive system) faster and faster.

It sounded like a train.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros