So, weird slightly related anecdote: My laptop I bought in 2014 came with a spinning rust hard drive, and I dual booted this machine Windows and Linux.

Since I can remember, (aka, Win 3.1) Windows always made a lot of noise with the hard drive. Start it loading something, like opening an application or something, and it would make this rapid, slightly random clicking noise with the hard drive access light just kinda spazzing out. On older, larger hard drives I remember it sounded like brewing coffee, like the bubble pump in a drip machine? Linux doesn't make that same sound, I guess it doesn't do a lot of frequent, scattered reads and writes to disk as Windows does?

Until I replaced the HDD with an SSD, I could tell which OS the laptop was running by listening to the hard drive.

[–] euphoric_cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I share this EXACT concern. I dualboot, and sometimes go lay in bed just for a bit so the pc is idling, and yeah, on windows the fans random ramp up and down constantly, on linux, consistently quiet

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Wasn't the fans (mind you the last version of Windows that have touched any of my machines was 8.1) it was the hard disk. Every Windows machine I've ever used with a mechanical hard drive, from a 486 IBM PS/2 to my Dell Inspiron laptop always sounded like the hard disk had baseball cards in the spokes. Linux doesn't make the same noise; it doesn't sound as frantic. It's like Windows has more papers to shuffle or something.

That almost immediately struck me when I started using Linux about ten years ago and no one else seems to know what I'm talking about.