Hard disks don’t like being yelled at
Here is a cool video showing that the sonic vibration from yelling at a high-speed disk can cause the latency of IOs to go up.
They are using the analytics from a Sun Unified Storage Server to show the info.
Update: I did some more research on the effects of vibration on hard drive performance. It looks like a lot of vendors are offering technology to attempt to compensate in certain drives models, although it gets tougher when you are using 15k RPM drives. Storage Mojo has a short post from about two years ago on the topic.
January 1st, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Fascinating. I imagine this has big ramifications for hard drives in mobile applications.
January 2nd, 2009 at 4:35 am
wow! crazy. So.. If you data center A/C unit slips a belt and starts making crazy noise, there goes your disk performance! (don’t worry about the overheating problem you’re soon to have, this is more important!, besides, that’s what backup A/C units are for)