The fact that things work at all is actually a small technological miracle: Magnetic hard drives, i.e. data storage devices, are high-precision components that are manufactured in a clean room – every speck of dust can damage them. Initially, they were the size of a refrigerator and could only hold a few megabytes of data. That’s just enough for one or two pieces of music. They existed back then, in the 1950s, but were far from digital.
But then, in the early 2000s, when you could play music videos on your laptop and hard drives shrunk to the size of a smartphone, employees of computer manufacturers were confronted with an extremely strange phenomenon. On some of the portable computers, the hard drive died when users watched a particular music video. Raymond Chen, longtime Microsoft programmer, has the story now for his blog dug up.
But what was it about Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation”? Even laptops that were next to someone else playing the song broke the disc – how could that be? The solution is pure physics. The song contained a frequency identical to the self-resonance of a series of hard drives. So the frequency from the song made the record vibrate until it eventually broke. A brief look at hard disk technology shows why this is the case.
Storage disks also don’t like it when they hit the floor roughly
Discs made of glass or metal alloys rotate at high speed in their airtight housings. They are coated with a magnetic material, they are written and read magnetically by finger-like structures whose end – the write and read head – whizzes back and forth just a few millionths of a millimeter above the disks. It’s obvious that with such small tolerances, it can’t be good if the record vibrates – bad vibrations, so to speak. The magnetic storage disks also don’t like it when they hit the floor roughly. That’s why modern laptops have an accelerometer that registers when a laptop falls. Then the read and write heads are parked in fractions of a second so that they don’t scratch the disks.
However, most of today’s laptops no longer contain hard drives with rotating discs, but ones made of semiconductor components, such as those found in USB sticks or smartphones. They are called Solid State Disks (SSD). They can store and read data orders of magnitude faster than traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDD). Because they are also less sensitive to shocks and vibrations, they quickly became established, although they were significantly more expensive, especially at the beginning.
Conventional hard drives are still not obsolete. They continue to do their job, especially in data centers, because it’s not the last ounce of speed that counts, but the price per storage unit. And since the drives with the rotating discs are still ahead.