Shouting at data‑centre hard drives can slow them down

Seventeen years ago an engineer showed that shouting at hard drives in a data centre can increase their latency. Bryan Cantrill uploaded a December 2008 video titled "Shouting in the Datacenter" demonstrating the experiment, and Ben Dicken recently resurfaced the clip from Brendan Gregg, who now works at OpenAI.

Gregg proved that shouting loud enough raised latency across a server rack and could even pinpoint which area took the brunt, since systems flag any disk that takes longer than normal. The effect comes from vibration: shouting close enough makes the drive vibrate, and that vibration interferes with its operation.

In the video he cups his hand and shouts right next to a drive; the data‑centre hum heard throughout did not appear to cause latency problems. Hard drives contain many mechanical components that make them vulnerable to vibration. SSDs, by contrast, rely on electrical currents rather than moving parts, so they are faster and more robust.

hard drives, data centre, shouting, latency, brendan gregg, bryan cantrill, vibration, ssds, server rack, openai