Monday 12 September 2016

Don't scream at your hard disks - 2016 version

Brendan Gregg while an engineer at Sun Microsystems in 2008 posted a YouTube video showing that shouting at hard disks could cause faults.

This past weekend ING Romania tested their datacentre's fire suppression system and according to the Motherboard the gas released with a 130dB+ noise that fatally damaged enough of their hard disks to knock out the datacentre. It seems their monitoring hardware's range topped out at 130dB. Ouch! They had swap over to their DR site and have still to determine the extent of the damage.

For comparison 130dB would be felt standing 15.24m (50ft) away from a military jet aircraft take-off with afterburner on an aircraft carrier.