In addition to rekindling the nostalgia of some, the song “Rhythm Nation” by Janet Jackson, released in 1989, would be able to implode hard drives. In any case, said Tuesday Raymond Chen, an engineer at Microsoft for twenty-five years. In an article posted on his blogspotted by The Vergehe tells the anecdote of one of his “colleagues” who worked on the support of the Windows XP operating system, launched in 2001 and disappeared in 2014.
The story begins with a strange observation from “a major computer manufacturer”. The latter noticed that certain computer models encountered bugs, or even stopped working, when the music video for the American artist’s song was launched. Several tests were done on other devices and the result was the same.
Nothing to fear today
To date, it is unknown which brands and which hard drives have suffered from this problem. “It turned out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies of the 5,400 rpm laptop hard drive model they were using, as well as those from other manufacturers,” Raymond Chen said on his blog. This acoustic phenomenon can then cause the system’s rotating disk to oscillate, which has the effect of crashing the computer, or even physically damaging the hard disk.
At the time, the flaw concerning “Rhythm Nation” had been the subject of a patch by the manufacturer, which had applied a filter in the audio module to block certain frequencies. An attack was however still possible if the sound came from outside the PC. Today, this type of acoustic malfunction is no longer possible because computers with hard drives at 5,400 revolutions per minute are very rare, specifies 01net.
