Disk Drives' Micro-Vibration Problem

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.

That’s not a huge problem for a single laptop running Excel, but Internet giants such as Google and Facebook are increasingly stocking their data centers with racks of consumer hard drives to keep costs down. By not taking into account the loss of performance caused by micro-vibrations, the technology companies are costing themselves as much as they save, according to Stephen Sicola, chief technology officer of Xiotech. “You’re wasting money because you’re breaking things when you don’t need to,” he says. Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz declined to comment. Facebook spokesman Michael Kirkland says vibration is “not a major issue in our facilities.”