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Comment by segasaturn | Hacker News Reader

This is a fun article but seriously lacking in details... musical frequencies crashing hard drives, including hard drives of laptops within earshot? That's a pretty extraordinary bug so I hoped there would be more elaboration. I also wonder if that patch to block those frequencies is still in effect.

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Shouting in data center increases disk latency: https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4

Old man yells at the clouds.

I wish I could upvote this twice

I wouldn't call it a "bug", more "unfortunate physics". Still possible to guard against that, specifically. (There will always be more "unfortunate physics", for example I bet that the hard disk also fails if I smash it against a wall at 100mph, but nobody's going do care designing a consumer HD that stops exhibiting that specific behavior.)

There's more physics issues with the speakers themselves; especially for something like a laptop speaker in a small enclosed space, it's totally possible to blow it out by turning the volume up too high.

There are various ways to protect against this, easiest being to just limit the top volume. If this is done in the official audio drivers then watch out if you decide to install Linux.

I'm not sure that the definition of "bug" is so narrow as to exclude unfortunate physics, given that it began as literal bugs before becoming metaphorical bugs. Erroneous human influences on software seems slightly farther from the original than peculiar physical influences on hardware!

The follow up article has more details:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...

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