Startups are figuring out ways to cut down on the "micro-vibrations" that make hard drives less efficient
Hard disks are a lot more sensitive than their name implies: They don’t like to be shouted at. Just ask Sun Microsystems engineer Brendan Gregg, who posted a YouTube video in which he yells at a rack of hard drives and then shows the corresponding increase in latency, the time it takes a drive to read and write information. The devices consist of a small arm hovering nanometers above a fast-spinning disk, and just as a record player will skip when bumped, the drives goof up when subjected to so-called micro-vibrations caused by sound waves or nearby movements.
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