[EXPLAINED] – Can a Song Crash Your Hard Drive?

Do you know there is a song that can crash your hard drive? This might seem like something straight out of a dystopian novel, but it has happened. This ‘song’ here refers to Janet Jackson’s 1989 classic hit ‘Rhythm Nation’.

While this song is quite old, somewhere in the 2000s, a major computer manufacturer discovered this song to be crashing laptops running with 5400 rpm hard drives inside. Let’s read more about this unique issue.

Why is This Specific Song Crashing HDDs?

To understand more about this issue, we need to first understand Resonance. Resonance is a phenomenon where the amplitude of a system increases due to the corresponding vibrations of another object.

To get to the root cause, investigators at Microsoft tested the song with numerous computers and found that this specific song affected laptops having hard drives with a smaller form factor that work at 5400 rpm.

According to the researchers, the song contains one of the natural resonant frequencies corresponding to that of the old 5400 rpm hard drives. Similar resonant frequencies tend to add up to destabilize the system. The same happened with the crashed hard drives in this case.

While playing this song, the researchers noted that not only it affects the computer, but also crashes laptops in its close vicinity with similar hard drives.

While there’s no mention of the manufacturer of the hard drives, upon learning about this issue, a shielding was added inside the hard drives to avoid system crashes. This was done to minimize the effects of any unwanted frequencies on the drive.

According to Raymond Chen (a Microsoft researcher), a similar case has also happened in 2008 where some data center engineers disrupted the hard drives by screaming at them.

Aftermath

It's been more than ten years since this incident, and hard drives have become significantly better at shielding their data from external interference. However, many cyber security analysts still think that this issue, which is related to acoustics-based cyber-attack can be exploited by many hackers to steal your data and misuse it. Therefore, NIST has tagged this song as a possible vulnerability among certain types of hard drives.

Another unique observation that the researchers came across while testing different types of hard drives was that all the affected hard drives had a compact form factor. As compact hard drives have less material and mass compared to the full-sized hard drives used in desktops, they were more vulnerable and got affected by the resonant frequencies in the song.

Lost Music Files. What to Do Now?

This is an interesting case of data loss. We know how frustrating it becomes to lose our music files or any other files due to a crashed computer, formatting, and more. However, it is possible to retrieve them using a professional data recovery software.

If playing this song on your computer has caused your computer to crash, it’s time for you to use Stellar Data Recovery Professional. This professional data recovery software lets you retrieve lost data and files like documents, pictures, and audio files of various formats like .mp3, .wav, .wma, etc. from corrupted storage devices or unbootable or crashed computers. It is a very capable software you can try your hands on to get a glimpse of what it can do.

To Wrap it Up

We live in strange times where technical glitches are not just limited to machine errors. Who could have imagined a song can crash the hard drive of a laptop? But it is something that has given technologists a new perspective on various computer errors, which in this case, happens due to Resonance.

While this is a one-of-a-kind instance that sent many IT researchers into delirium, thanks to incidents like this, our new-age hard drives have become far more capable of preventing such errors.

We hope this article helped you understand this unique technical challenge.

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