Some of you may remember the days when it was inadvisable to yell at a HDD array, the latency issue has been mostly overcome with the advances in technology over the last decade.  That does not mean it is completely gone, as the read head in a HDD cannot read from a disk that is oscillating due to external input such as sound, and those tiny delays are how this researcher was able to use the HDD as a low quality microphone.  He also found a tone which created even more latency than in that video; enough to have a system drop the disk as bad.  There are links to the research over at Slashdot, including the new improved way to verbally abuse your storage devices.

"It's not accurate yet to pick up conversations," Ortega told Bleeping Computer in a private conversation. "However, there is research that can recover voice data from very low-quality signals using pattern recognition. I didn't have time to replicate the pattern-recognition portion of that research into mine. However, it's certainly applicable."

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