“Gentlemen, start your platters!”
Start your platters is right! Our VAX mainframe utilized dual 160mb external hard drives, each in dishwasher-sized cabinets, requiring 220 power. Spinning up those babies, you had the distinct impression of power as the rpms increased, making one heck of a low-to-high pitched whine. The mainframe & the drives required an air-conditioned cold room.
A few years later, we tried to donate that old equipment to a high school or a tech school. No one wanted it. I ended up dismantling the VAX piece by piece so it was light enough to be tossed in the 20-foot building dumpster. I saved the “pizza oven” tape drive for a while but eventually it got tossed, too.