Janet Jackson Had the Power to Crash Laptop Computers (2022)

I heard enough of stories of a bottom of the barrel SSDs wildly exceeding expectations by actually crashing with a partial or a full data loss waaay below their expected write endurance and while still powered on. Sure, these are the real bottom of the barrel, like Netac or KingSpec - but I won't expect any non-server grade SSD to retain data at all for any meaningful time.

Many of us have old cheap flash drives, which may have some backups (family photos, videos, career files, etc.) we may not want to lose - so they may qualify for such periodic basic maintenance (just plugging them into the PC once in 6 months or so).

I think most home users don't know this can be a potential problem for flash drive storage.

What is definitely well documented is Brendan Gregg’s related discovery of performance degradation in servers from vibration of sibling servers / clapping nearby that caused spinning disks to pause their heads.

I originally posted my own comment with link and prose, but then saw GP's comment which preceded mine by an hour, so I deleted mine. I didn't originally realize it was that same video because it didn't say so, but then I recognized the link hash. I want people to see that video, because it's so great, so I added context as a reply.

In their younger days, two distinct distinguished engineers, Bryan Cantrill and Brendan Gregg, made this video where they scream at a data storage server nicknamed Thumper. Screaming at it has surprising results, which are observed with a novel software technology called dtrace.

The Sun Fire X4500 was a 4U dense storage sever, 4U with 48 disks and insane IO performance and a newish filesystem called ZFS. The video is not only funny in content, it features technology and technologists that became very impactful, hence the classic tag.

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I love the lore, so I'll drop more.

While our team previously used AFS (mainly for its great caching) and many storage servers, this hardware combined with its software allowed us to consolidate and manage and access data in new ways, alleviating many of our market data analysis problems.

We switched to NFS, which previously was not performant enough for us on other hw/sw architectures. While using NFS with the Thumpers and then Thors (X4540) was fantastic, eventually the data scales became hard again and we made a distributed immutable filesystem that looked like the Hadoop HDFS and Cassandra file systems, named after our favorite Klingon Worf (Write-Once Read-Frequently).

Interestingly, in 2025 both XTX [1] and HRT [2] open-sourced their distributed file systems which are pretty similar to it, using 2020's tech rather than 2000's. HRT's is based on Meta's Tectonic which is a spiritual successor to Cassandra.

I wrote about our parallel HFT networking journey once upon a time on HN. [3]

[1] https://www.xtxmarkets.com/tech/2025-ternfs/

[2] https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/hrtbeat/distributed-files...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31924784

Without disputing the conclusion, is the wavelength the right measurement, or should that be half the wavelength?

You're misunderstanding the numbers here. Going from 12 to 7 Hz is most of an octave, nearly doubling wavelengths.

Also SVS's numbers are gonna be the usual marketing stuff, so they're assuming a fat room gain curve, and just looking at their website they have a disclaimer on their graphs that it doesn't represent actual total output capability. Which is a way of hiding that if you actually try to drive it that hard that low with ~3kw electrical in those voice coils are going to torch.

The non lying way to prove that claim is to show large signal Kipple results including the heat soak. They ain't doin' that here.

Basically stuff going this low is really exotic and more in the realm of servos that simulate earthquakes than traditional transducers.

Tom Danley is the world expert on this sort of thing. He used to build stuff like ultrasonic levitation ovens and full scale sonic boom simulators for JPL/NASA.

In the audio world he was first famous as the tech lead behind ServoDrive. This now defunct company made special effects subwoofers using DC rotary servo motors to drive the diaphragm. They were used as special effects subs in that era by big acts like Garth Brooks. But they didn't catch on outside that niche because very little music has significant content below 40 hz as it just turns into a muddle rumble that harms sound quality as a whole. So to use these sorts of things you have to mix for it specifically. Cinema goes lower with the rumbles down to 15hz, but that's basically it.

Getting anything that's like a clean tone at 7hz is not gonna happen without a purpose built device.

FWIW Tom Danley started his own company[1] after Servo Drive failed on the business side, where he focuses on large scale horn speakers using novel topologies. They're among the best in the business at what they. Again, they don't have anything that even remotely tries to go down to 7hz.

[1]: https://www.danleysoundlabs.com/

Tom's a nice guy, I've traded emails with him a few times over the years. He used to be pretty active on the DIY speaker building mailing lists sharing his very in depth knowledge freely.

But also the original post was about a 7hz tone somehow resonating with a chicken's skull cavity, which if you know the basic wave equation relating wavelength with frequency is an absurdity. The waves involved are multiple orders of magnitude too big to couple to a volume that small. They'll just diffract around like nothing.