alt Hacker NewsWhat is claimed in TFA is that the hard drive resonate frequency reacts to the Janet Jackson video in bad ways because that music video puts out music that interferes with what the hard drive expects.
TFA was lacking details so this is merely a retelling.
Obviously not the video but the accompanying audio track. Could also just be a made up apocryphal engineering story that never actually happened exactly as described. Engineering as a profession is chock full of them but they do tend to be memorable parables of things to keep in mind when working on a relevant piece of tech.
What is definitely well documented is Brendan Gregg’s related discovery of performance degradation in servers from vibration of sibling servers / clapping nearby that caused spinning disks to pause their heads.