My goodness was defragging really that mechanically loud or is this exaggerated for effect?

For such a long time (as in, well into the tail end of Windows XP) I was stuck with an old Pentium computer that could handle Windows 98SE at most. Had maybe 2GB of HDD to work with which sounded luxurious to me until my father was issued a 4GB flash drive at work. I defragged this every first Sunday of the month to keep things running smooth. Ofc the effect might as well be purely psychological but hey, as I said it did last me a long time.

The mechanical sounds I remember are finer, not like pop snoring no? :)

Yes, my hard disc at that time (similar experience) was more silent. The sound is either exaggerated or from some even older 5.25" disc.

I still have in a drawer some 80 GB and 250 GB Maxtor drives that are really that loud. I remember when I replaced by 80GB root disk with a 1 TB HGST one, the sudden silence in my office...

I miss it to be honest. All of the computer-ey sounds made it a lot of fun, and it's not something I thought I'd miss until they were gone.

Every once in a while I hear my AIO spin up and some water start moving around and that's nice (not sure if it's supposed to do that but it's done it since day one). But that's all I have to look forward to other than the fan noise.

You can perfectly build a noisy tower computer in 2021, with lots of fans and of course the good old hard discs (instead of SSDs). :-)

It was that loud on certain hard drives, yes.

I just realized this is my first white noise machine that would put me to sleep after sitting and messing with my computer all night. I'd finally do the defrag and listen to that hard drive or whatever it was making that noise. And go peacefully to sleep. Just to be awoken a couple hours later by someone letting me know I was late for school.