Platter

A menu bar app for macOS

Your Mac is too quiet.

Platter puts a mechanical hard drive in your menu bar. Real seeks, real spin up, a real activity light, all driven by what your Mac is actually reading and writing.

Download free Source on GitHub Watch the demo

Free and open source · macOS 13 or later · Apple Silicon and Intel · 1.1 MB
by Jason O’Connell

The Platter panel open under its menu bar icon, with the IDE drive selected and the write light on.

Remember this sound?

Fifty three seconds. Turn your sound on.

Demo · 1080p · sound on Save the video

Six drives. One switch.

Every drive is synthesized live, from the spindle motor and bearings to the actuator arm hitting its stops. Nothing is a recording, so no two seeks sound the same.

3.5″ Floppy

1.44 MB · 1990s

Stepper buzz hunting for track zero, then a tick every time it moves a track.

300RPM

5.25″ Floppy

360 KB · 1980s

Head load solenoid, belt drive hum, and the head banging its stop on every recalibrate.

300RPM

Stepper HDD

20 MB MFM · 1986

Zzzzt, chunk. A stepper motor that walks the heads one track at a time.

3600RPM

IDE Drive

540 MB · 1995

The grind you heard every time a program loaded. Ball bearings, loud seeks, the occasional recalibration.

5400RPM

Desktop HDD

250 GB · 2005

Crisp little ticks and a soft whine. Peak LAN party.

7200RPM

Server 15K

146 GB SAS

A datacenter aisle at arm’s length. Fast, dense seeks over a high spindle whine.

15000RPM

It listens to your Mac.

Platter reads the same disk counters Activity Monitor shows and turns every burst into seeks, settles and rotational waits, the way a real drive would service them.

Live

Follows your Mac’s real reads and writes. Copy a big folder and it grinds. Leave it alone and it mostly hums.

Ambient

An idle computer from 1997: the odd read, a write flush now and then.

Busy

A heavy workload on loop, like installing software from a stack of disks.

green light: readingamber light: writingno network access · no tracking

Install in a minute

Platter is free and not sold through the App Store, so macOS asks you to confirm it the first time.

  1. Download and unzip Platter-1.0.zip.

  2. Drag Platter into Applications.

  3. Open it once. If macOS says it can’t verify the developer, open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

    Or skip that step by pasting this into Terminal:

    xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Platter.app

  4. Click the little drive in your menu bar and flip the switch. Right click the icon any time to turn it on or off.

Come make it better.

Platter is free and open source. The whole sound engine is one small C file, so adding a drive is mostly tuning numbers until it sounds right. Bring your ears.

Star and fork on GitHub Pitch an idea