Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

> There was a case where a fan in a compute node stopped working, and to compensate this failing fan, fans in other compute nodes started to operate at their maximal speed, which then generated heavy noise and vibration that degraded the disk performance.

I've never heard of such thing, can vibrations from a fan really influence disk performance?

View on HN

Yes. Loud noises and even yelling degrade disk performance as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

This is one of the classics! I love it. Screaming at a HDD.

I started screaming in my cubicle watching this.

In the days of burning CD's I was always told that you should be quiet and not touch the PC when you were burning. In my experience there was indeed a correlation between noise and the success of burning. I'm not sure if this is a placebo effect or not, and if this also holds for reading CD's.

On the other hand, if you have a laptop with an SSD (which is non-mechanical) there shouldn't be too much sensitivity to vibrations, I think.

I remember how I didn't dare to touch the computer during burning other than move the mouse a few pixels here and there so it has it peace and the screensaver do not kick in. CDs were expensive and burnig was a hour-long process.

That upgrade path from 2x to 52x was so nice though.

I previously had a vendor replace hundreds of systems due to a poor fan design where they mounted it under a spinning disk. It is very surprising how sensitive they are.

Yes. Mechanical disks are very sensitive to vibrations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com