I guess that dimension of debugging is now lost with SSDs. I didn't run an anti-virus and noticed by machine had caught a virus (in this case, DOS/Natas) because of the extra moments of whirrs during boot and when running applications.
I wonder how much slower processes would run if you generate sound on the computer itself from every hard drive write. I don't have deep enough knowledge about the OS to know where you would run your sound program without affecting performance (i.e., are there log files that could be read, so it is not directly interacting with the hard drive writes? would those still be timely enough to give a good indicator of what the computer is actually doing?)
If that could be solved, then you could have a sound for network activity, every time a kernel module loads, etc, so users don't need to have deep knowledge of the system to know when there is a problem- they just have to learn what sounds right. I think it would be really neat to have music made by the machine itself and love the idea of adding back that dimension of debugging.