Janet Jackson’s megawatts crash on older hard drives

Janet Jackson song the rhythm of the nation It hit like a bombshell in 1989, and quickly climbed the charts. At the time, no one knew the song would be on Microsoft’s software engineer’s radar more than three decades later — and not because the music is good.

The engineer in question is Raymond Chen, and he recently made an interesting post on the official Microsoft blog titled Janet Jackson has the power to smash laptops..

hard drive crashes

According to Raymond Chen, “a major PC maker” discovered that some laptops from the mid-2000s could crash if the rhythm of the nation played on them.

Presumably, the explanation for the improbable crash is that the song has a certain resonant frequency that causes the moving parts in old hard drives to vibrate to the breaking point.

These are magnetic disk hard drives at 5400 rpm, and in his post, Raymond Chen wrote that PC manufacturers had previously solved the problem by adding a dedicated audio filter that blocks the respective resonant frequency.

Audio frequencies can degrade performance

The strange discovery is said to have been made on a Windows XP machine, and given numbers 2022-38392 in CVEwhich is a database that lists known vulnerabilities and exposures in IT systems.

It’s long been known that certain audio frequencies can reduce the performance of hard drives with moving parts — something immortal in the YouTube clip below of a man screaming at the server rack.