Saturday, January 3rd 2009
Don't Yell at Your Hard Drives: Sun Engineer
No, seriously don't. An engineer at Sun Microsystems' Fishworks lab discovered that yelling at your hard-drive causes sharp (yet momentary) increases in the hard-drive's latency. The engineer demonstrated this by yelling a portion of a server holding a RAID JBOD array, while monitoring its IO/s and latencies of the drive he was yelling at it. Each time he yelled at it, there was a surge in the drive's latency. The engineer posted his demonstration on YouTube. Now you know that yelling at your hard-drive isn't going to help, or is it? This opens up some interesting topics to research on, of how the rather loud environment enterprise hard-drives are put through in high-density storage environments impact on them, and to what extant vibration dampening helps them. The video can be viewed here.
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