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Members of ING Bank<\/a> found themselves unable to use their debit cards this weekend due to a completely unexpected technical failure: it was just too dang loud. More specifically, a loud noise caused by a fire extinguisher test knocked out a few dozen hard-drives<\/a> at the bank’s main data center in Bucharest Romania. It’s an uncommon, but not unknown phenomenon — sound causes vibration, and hard-drives hate<\/em> being jostled.<\/p>\n The bank was testing an electronics-safe fire suppression system in the main data center, but a pressure discrepancy caused the system to emit a loud noise while expelling inert gas. According to the bank, the sound was measured a over 130dB — apparently loud enough to knock the HDD’s physical components out of alignment.<\/p>\n That makes sense, but why hasn’t something like this happened before? In a paper about hard-drive fragility and fire suppression systems, IBM researchers blame the march of progress<\/a>: "Early disc storage had much greater spacing between data tracks because it held less data," The paper reads. "Which is a likely reason why this issue was not apparent until recently." Modern hard drives are less tolerant, and will fail if its read\/write arm nudges 1\/1,000,000 of an inch off of its data track. Good to know for folks building data centers with potentially loud fire suppression systems — but maybe this is just yet another sign that solid state storage is the future<\/a>.<\/p>\n Source: <\/strong>Motherboard<\/a>, Data Center Journal<\/a><\/p>\n via https:\/\/ift.tt\/2cmRpVf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Members of ING Bank found themselves unable to use their debit cards this weekend due to a completely unexpected technical failure: it was just too dang loud. More specifically, a loud noise caused by a fire extinguisher test knocked out a few dozen hard-drives at the bank’s main data center in Bucharest Romania. It’s an … <\/p>\n