Hard Drives have feeling too?

Everyone has to come clean. You've done it. I've done it. Everyone who has ever had to use a computer knows what its like waiting for a computer to pull up information. Hearing the whirl of the hard drive being read...feeling the impatience. Thinking that: "I thought computers were supposed to be faster than this." And let's be honest...that last thought I wrote about is often heard being yelled at the computer. Let's face it: It's therapeutic emotionally. However, there may be more consequences. I read a post on G4TV's blog:

Thanks to Brendan Gregg of Sun's Fishworks team, we know for a FACT yelling at your computer doesn't do anything helpful, and in fact increases latency.

Brendan wanted to see the effects of vibration on a disc array, so the best idea he came up with for improvised vibration was yelling at it. I'm glad I'm not kidding. What resulted (besides an incredibly hilarious video) was a sharp spike the number of I/O operations that take over 5ms to complete. Lesson learned: electronics won't listen to you.

In other words, sound vibration has the effect of increasing the time it takes to perform reading and writing operations on a hard disk in a hard drive. So yelling at your computer only makes it take longer in doing what you want. To be honest yelling at any human beings make him or her less likely to listen, but to some varying level refuse to cooperate. Machines are more like us than I thought. Here is a video of Mr. Gregg performing his tests.



I'd personally, like to see the tests done in a quiet room. I'd like to know what effect the sounds from the air conditioners made to Gregg's tests.