I’m going to drop a little knowledge first.
The common hard drive uses an arm holding read/write heads over spinning metal platters (like a record player! but smaller and faster with a lot of arms, heads, and platters).
Years ago, hard drives though were physically the same size, didn’t have near the storage capacity and precision as they do today, were tolerant (to an extent) to vibration, today’s hard drives with the terabytes they can hold can only tolerate 1/1,000,000 of an inch in vibration. Any more than that deviation will just stop the read/write heads from doing any reading or writing.
The Story
ING Bank was testing the inert gas within their fire suppression system at their data center and it was so loud (noise = vibration), it vibrated the read/write heads over the spinning metal platters more than 1/1,000,000 of an inch and it took greater than 10 hours to restart every system in their data center.
The bank put out a press release (written in Romanian, but if you use Chrome, you can auto-translate it)
On a side note, this proves screaming at your computer when it’s slow doesn’t make it work better.
