Yes, it made a racket! There is a description of the Harvard Mark I crashing in Beyer's "Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age":
> Hopper, Campbell, and Bloch invested substantial energy in developing practices and procedures for debugging. Like physicians, they identified symptoms, made diagnoses, and prescribed treatments. Sometimes symptoms were obvious, as when Mark I would come to a crashing halt: “The crash of that thing sounded as if a plane had run into the building,” Hopper recalled. ”You never heard such a crash in your life.”
> Hopper, Campbell, and Bloch invested substantial energy in developing practices and procedures for debugging. Like physicians, they identified symptoms, made diagnoses, and prescribed treatments. Sometimes symptoms were obvious, as when Mark I would come to a crashing halt: “The crash of that thing sounded as if a plane had run into the building,” Hopper recalled. ”You never heard such a crash in your life.”