Tonal noise sensitivity in hard drives

• Main Authors: Nickerson, Matthew L., Green, Kent, Pai, Nitin
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1939-800X
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4867335

High levels of noise have been found to cause offline events and data loss in information technology equipment in multiple data centers. Studies by this author and others showed these events were a result interaction between rotational storage media or hard drives (HDD) and air-borne noise. In particular, noise with a great degree of tonal content posed the greatest threat to HDD performance. A series of tests has been performed to understand this noise-HDD interaction. A test fixture was built and HDDs were exposed to sinusoidal signatures from 1000 Hz to 16 kHz. The incident sound pressure was monitored to capture the sensitivity of the HDDs at multiple sound pressure levels. Sound pressure, frequency and HDD performance were all correlated along with known HDD manufacturer provided vibratory sensitivities. Each subsequent generation of HDD showed greater incidence of tonal sensitivities and lower sound pressure level needed to achieve such high levels of performance degradation. Given the correlation with the vibratory sensitivities, the tonal response seems to be unique to the design and manufacture of each HDD individually.