[existencebox]

I realize this is slightly off topic, but I want to nerd out for a moment re: your comment on hearing something wrong with the tape drive; a skill I always felt was under-recognized for how much of a "superpower" it gives you, that being how critical sound is for a good sysop. Broken AC belts, bad hard drive backplanes, boot cycles, all things I've run into where the sound was the cue; detecting an unalerted tape drive failure is the icing on the diagnostic case.

[LeifCarrotson]

Audio is an incredibly rich feedback mechanism for all kinds of mechanical processes. And the fascinating part about it is that our brains process it so effortlessly. If the data your ears can analyze from your car were presented visually, perhaps as a scrolling FFT spectral graph or plots of a host of sensors, you'd never notice a momentary misfire or a tiny change in pitch. It would be complete data overload! But even untrained ears can pick out errant noises.

[ansible]

I had another incident like that earlier in my IT career.

I was a 'terminal room consultant' in college... back when we had serial terminals hooked to Unix systems. Part of the job was the care and feeding of a couple printers, a big ol' line printer (green bar paper) and a Printronix graphics printer (dot matrix, for printing out fancy lab reports you wrote up using troff).

So over time, from loading paper and clearing jams, I had accumulated hours and hours of hearing these two guys chatter as they went about their business.

At one point, I noticed that the Printronix printer sounded funny. Just off, in some way. So I call it in for maintenance, but they don't seem to care what an undergraduate punk thought about printer sounds.

Sure enough, a week later, I see it is down and taken apart for repairs.

Your ears, your nose, all your senses should be used for debugging and general investigation.

[linker3000]

Here in the HGST EMEA lab, you will often find an engineer listening to a drive spin up with an induction pick-up and amplifier, muttering something like "Yep, this one's running firmware XYZ", or "Hmm, sounds like this one has the older, unmodified ramp".