If you are anything like me, you’ve very often wanted to yell at, kick and smash your computer when it starts to act up on you.  Maybe it won’t POST, maybe it has some nasty spyware or maybe it is just locking and freezing – either way we now have PROOF that yelling at your PC won’t do any good.  And in fact, we have PROOF that yelling at it actually slows it down. 

A post over at engadget alerted me to some crazy people at Sun that found yelling at a hard drive causes enough vibration that it will actually dramatically slow down seek times and increase drive latency.  No, really.  Here’s the crazy people on video to prove it.

Here’s a tip for everyone who hasn’t made the jump to solid state: try to be nice to your disk drive. Brendan Gregg from Sun’s Fishworks team wanted to see the effects of vibrations on his disk array, so he proceeded to shout at it. On video. Yeah, we bet that’s pretty embarrassing for the drive in question, and what results is a sharp spike the number of I/O operations that take over 5ms to complete. Moral of the story? Yelling at your computer isn’t going to make it run any faster. How about next time we see how it reacts to Ozzy, Mozart and warm, gentle nuzzles? We’ve placed video of Gregg’s sadistic hardware taunts after the break.