News Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Nation' Crashes Hard Drives

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Not many new ones anyway. Sure there are old ones running it.

Its a problem that is more likely to have caused issues 30 years ago, when peoples PC randomly crash while someone plays that song, but its chances of happening have decreased as time passed.
 
einheriar said:
Awesome does it work with 3½ " 5400 rpm drives? My NAS runs with WD red plus drives.
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I would imagine so. There are plenty 5400 spinners out there, including cheaper laptops. But to be honest, the head distance is so close these days it might not effect it. They practically ride on the surface using ground effect forces. Today's drives even auto recalibrate from people walking in the room. (I isolate mine on rubber and felt feet.)


Admin said:
A bizarre situation in which a Janet Jackson music video can crash a laptop has gained official recognition.

Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Nation' Crashes Hard Drives : Read more
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Talk about a killer beat!
 
If you work in a datacentre, don't set your phone ringtone to a mix of 5.4kHz and 7.2kHz sine waves, unless you want to find yourself busy replacing more drives than usual!
Or a very annoying day if your server's array crashes because the server next to yours in the COLO got pwned and the fans set to 7.2kRPM and the speaker set to squeal at 7.2kHz.

I wonder if a Janet Jackson concert could be correlated with drive failures in the surrounding area?
 
edzieba said:
If you work in a datacentre, don't set your phone ringtone to a mix of 5.4kHz and 7.2kHz sine waves, unless you want to find yourself busy replacing more drives than usual!
Or a very annoying day if your server's array crashes because the server next to yours in the COLO got pwned and the fans set to 7.2kRPM and the speaker set to squeal at 7.2kHz.

I wonder if a Janet Jackson concert could be correlated with drive failures in the surrounding area?
Click to expand...
LoL. 5400 drives killed Janet Jackson. Stream it or buy the audio. Ripped my JJ CD to .flac.
 
einheriar said:
Awesome does it work with 3½ " 5400 rpm drives? My NAS runs with WD red plus drives.
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No, different platter size means different resonant frequency and ostensibly you'd be playing it with different speakers. The anecdote is of a specific laptop model's speakers playing that song.
 
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edzieba said:
If you work in a datacentre, don't set your phone ringtone to a mix of 5.4kHz and 7.2kHz sine waves, unless you want to find yourself busy replacing more drives than usual!
Or a very annoying day if your server's array crashes because the server next to yours in the COLO got pwned and the fans set to 7.2kRPM and the speaker set to squeal at 7.2kHz.

I wonder if a Janet Jackson concert could be correlated with drive failures in the surrounding area?
Click to expand...
That is totally wrong, lol. Drives spin at 5400 and 7200 revolutions per minute, not per second. A tone at 5.4kHz is 5400 cycles per second. And in any case, the spin rate is not the platter resonant frequency, or else the drive would crash itself in regular operation.
 
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Admin said:
A bizarre situation in which a Janet Jackson music video can crash a laptop has gained official recognition.

Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Nation' Crashes Hard Drives : Read more
Click to expand...
i think everyone has seen the floppytron playing the Imperil march and other tunes. i am starting to wonder if its possible to write code that the harddrive or other component (u1 rack fans, power coils on motherboards) in a machine play a tune that crashes itself. getting flashes of Stuxnet but playing tunes
 
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I wonder if I can try this one out. I have a few 5400 rpms lying around in different sizes and capacity hailing from the netbook era (80GB, 160GB, both 3.5 and 2.5 inches), even my PC runs a 500GB 2.5 inch currently. Heck, I still have a 250GB netbook for a more accurate experience.

This won't be the first time I come across weird issue like this (cue my PC that only turns on at 9PM only), it would be interesting. Not sure if I have to spend the money to buy the tune though..
 
Computers with SSD are safe from her. And she is not my favorite musician anyway. By the way "Rythm Nation" is pumpy, which on 1kW+ speakers in short distance indeed would destroy not only laptop drives but laptops temselwes. And shatter all surrounding windows with that.
 
Many years ago, I saw a youtube video where some guy had a GUI displaying realtime RAID error stats. He then yelled into the front panel of a server and you could see a flurry of errors on the screen. Of course, that's somewhat different than actually causing a head crash, which is pretty impressive.
 
david germain said:
i am starting to wonder if its possible to write code that the harddrive or other component (u1 rack fans, power coils on motherboards) in a machine play a tune that crashes itself. getting flashes of Stuxnet but playing tunes
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I'm pretty sure I've seen youtube videos of hard drives playing tunes, based on seek commands. Long ago, I remember reading a hard drive spec sheet where the actuator type was listed as "voice coil". This gave me the idea that you ought to be able to remove the actuator arm and attach it to a paper cone, in order to build a potentially rather high-quality speaker.

I'm certain that actuator is thousands of times more accurate than anything in the audio world.
 
escksu said:
I don't think there are laptops using HDD these days ...
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I had one, but there was actually a period of time where you could get SSDs with a PATA interface!

When I discovered that, I did a big upgrade to: SSD + 2 GB of RAM + blu-ray RW drive + faster CPU (yeah, Pentium M was actually socketed!). The result was decent, but still dated by that point. The bigger issue was that I wanted to run Linux and the GPU in the thing lacked driver support, which made the GUI painfully slow. That aside, I remember bulding gcc on it, and it was still awfully slow (i.e. compared with something like a Core 2 Quad, that I was probably using as a desktop at the time).
 
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