Yeah, I know what you mean.
For older machines, I particularly like all the noises the old hard drives make (especially some of those old 5 1/4 inch ones).
Specifically, the old 20 MB drives in in the SE (when they work), and the HD20 mechanism, are really neat sounding (I like how they gradually spin up to full speed, and make that distinctive ker-clunk, ker-clunk, ker-clunk sound.)
As for more modern machines making noise, well, I'm sorta mixed. A bit of fan noise is OK, but too much can get kind of annoying (especially with fans that have bad bearings, which make more of a buzzing or whining sound; the MDD definitely counts as a machine which is slightly too loud, with the QS coming up as second).
c