17 years ago, one engineer made a very important discovery: If you shout at data centre HDDs, they slow down

HDDs may be a little box of aluminium, copper, and sometimes ceramics, but their most human trait is apparently that they slow down when you scream at them. One engineer discovered that 17 years ago, and I'm not too sure how.

Taking to X, Ben Dicken recently shared this discovery from Brendan Gregg, who is now presumably shouting at HDDs over at OpenAI, where he works. But before getting snapped up by Sam Altman, way back in December 2008 Bryan Cantrill uploaded a video to YouTube eloquently titled "Shouting in the Datacenter".

Gregg showed that simply shouting loud enough could increase latency on a server rack, and he could even point out which area took the brunt of the shout, as their PC flags any disk that takes lon...