Hard drives have many natural enemies, perhaps too many. Heat, overvoltage, bumps... the truth is that it doesn't take much to destroy them or interrupt their normal operation. In fact, a single song proved to be more than enough: Raymond Chen, one of Microsoft's principal software engineers, shared a story about laptops with hard drives affected by Janet Jackson's famous single, Rhythm Nation. What exactly happened?
Imagine for a moment that someone brings their laptop in for repair and says: “I was listening to a song and it stopped working.” The first thing that comes to mind is skepticism, since playing a CD or an MP3 song shouldn't have that kind of impact. Worse yet, the song didn't just freeze the operating system, it knocked the hard drive out of commission.
What would be “logical” in these cases? We might think the laptop fell to the floor, victim of an elbow during dancing, or launched at terminal speeds by the little ones in the house. However... there is a precedent that places all the blame on the song. We're not talking about an infected or corrupted file: the simple act of playing the music was what left those drives offline. To learn that story, there's no one better than Raymond Chen, one of Microsoft's masterminds.
Rhythm Nation: Janet Jackson and the Deadly Resonance
Chen explains on his blog that he heard this story through a colleague who worked in Windows XP support. A “major manufacturer” of hardware had discovered that the music video for Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation was affecting several models of its laptop line. The investigation also confirmed that playing the video damaged competitors' laptops, and as if that weren't enough, one laptop playing the song could knock out another nearby laptop.
Virus, malware, patches, bumps? None of that: engineers discovered that the song possessed one of the natural resonant frequencies for the 5,400 RPM hard drives that this and other manufacturers used in their products. The OEM's solution was simply to place a filter in the audio pipeline to eliminate the most problematic frequencies during playback. Chen believes they added a “Do not remove” label to that filter, and his concern is that the warning is still there after all these years, without anyone knowing its origin.
One of the best examples of hard drives “disturbed” by unexpected vibrations has been on YouTube for several years. Brendan Gregg of the Fishworks team at Sun Microsystems demonstrated the latency and performance effects by shouting at a group of hard drives. Obviously we don't recommend doing that, but listening to Janet shouldn't cause problems today.
Sources: Microsoft DevBlogs, The Verge
