Am I literally giving off bad vibes?

December 25, 2009 7:07 PM

Is it possible that something about my presence causes hard drives to fail?

I fully expect the answer to this question to be a rousing chorus of "confirmation bias," but on the off chance that there is a scientific explanation, I'm very curious.

All my life, hard drives have failed around me. From 2000 to 2008, no fewer than five of my personal hard drives failed. When I moved in with my ex, his hard drive failed within a few weeks. A few days after I bought a used Tivo, the hard drive failed. I'm visiting with my parents right now, and their hard drive failed today.

My friends have joked that I must emit an electromagnetic field (or something) that causes hard drives to break. I don't mistreat them, but is it possible that there really is something about me?

posted by telegraph to Science & Nature (22 answers total)

The same thing happens to me. I can screw up a computer or electronic device just by getting near it. What makes it worse is that I will futz with it for hours, trying to fix it or figure out what I did and when I finally give in and ask my husband for help, it fixes itself. He just has to get near it or do something simple (that I have done 100 times) and it will work. Drives me nuts. It may be confirmation bias but it happens a lot and is kind of a running, frustrating joke in our household.
posted by pearlybob at 7:18 PM on December 25, 2009

If you're right, you'll be in good company.
posted by d. z. wang at 7:34 PM on December 25, 2009

Have you accidentally self-magnetized yourself? Do you have a plate in your head, or a hip replacement? Maybe you shuffle your feet when you walk, and have a net static charge at all times?
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 7:38 PM on December 25, 2009

Hard drives are pretty hard to wreck; dansdata has a good primer on coercivity. Static maybe, but not magnetism.
posted by gjc at 7:41 PM on December 25, 2009 [1 favorite]

I don't know, but watches break with me. I know that this is not confirmation bias or selective memory. I have literally had as many as five digital watches break on me, in a row, within a week of purchasing them brand new. There's no way that's a coincidence. And, I was using a very well known brand in $60-$80 range. This string of failures has happened to me on two independent occasions.

I finally switched brands and now everything works fine.

So, it seems like there could be something to this sort of phenomenon.
posted by crapples at 7:54 PM on December 25, 2009

I don't know, but watches break with me. I know that this is not confirmation bias or selective memory. I have literally had as many as five digital watches break on me, in a row, within a week of purchasing them brand new.

Were they all from the same store? It could have been a bad batch.
posted by delmoi at 8:05 PM on December 25, 2009

I know it sounds weird.
My dad had a presence that would disrupt radio reception (AM/FM, I don't remember).
posted by Drasher at 8:40 PM on December 25, 2009

telegraph posted "Is it possible that something about my presence causes hard drives to fail?"

No. Now if you are over there shaking the heck out of them while they are running and dropping them on the floor then you could be responsible. Otherwise it's not you.

crapples writes "I have literally had as many as five digital watches break on me, in a row, within a week of purchasing them brand new. There's no way that's a coincidence."

Without knowing at least what percentage of digital watches fail in the first few weeks of ownership you have no way of determining this. If only because you don't know, and in fact suspect otherwise, that the events are independent. Besides you could just as easily correlate the failures with a planetary alignment, the boat they came from China in or the final inspector in the factory.
posted by Mitheral at 8:44 PM on December 25, 2009 [3 favorites]

You can use the scientific method. You hypothesize that your vibes cause hard disks to fail. Find an operating hard disk and try using your vibes to make it fail. Repeat. Analyze your results. Report back here!
posted by fritley at 9:08 PM on December 25, 2009 [4 favorites]

I have walked into a room and *all* electronics in the room went down.
It was a mysterious occcurence, not a power outage or surge. I was in a very heightened emotional state. However, as soon as I left the room, all the electronics came back on.

I also attributed my experience to an unusual electromagnetic field that my body emitted.
posted by at the crossroads at 9:30 PM on December 25, 2009

FWIW for a while I had the theory that my presence would turn off street lights. It seemed like lots of times when I was walking by one I would see it blink off or on--most often out of the corner of my eye. I'm electrically charged or whatever . . .

Then I started observing street lights a little more closely and I realized that a large number of them cycle on and off regularly--whether I or anyone else is nearby paying attention. So the whole "I'm electrically charged and control streets lights through my aura" thing came about because when I walked by, I happened to notice something that a large number of street lights were doing all the time, whether I was there or not. But because I only noticed it when I was there I assumed it had something to do with my presence. Once I noticed it and started keeping track it seemed to happen all the time, "confirming" that I was the cause of it.

So that's my suggestion for your hard drive failures.

Hard drives fail all the time--it's their nature. Due to pure luck you may have had a slightly higher failure rate than normal. But the amount you've had fail certainly falls well within the normal range.

In fact, thinking back, I'm pretty sure I've had at least 5 hard drives fail since 2000. My dad's hard drive failed once when I was visiting, etc.

Hard drives fail with spectacular frequency. And there are only two types of hard drives--those that have failed already and those that will fail pretty soon.

If you have valuable data on one, back it up regularly!
posted by flug at 9:56 PM on December 25, 2009

This is confirmation bias. The dirty little secret in the storage business is that hard drives are sold for performance first and reliability last. Theyre always failing. In the time it took you to read this sentence, dozens have failed and hundreds have discovered bad sectors. The problem here is the assumption that drives are these super reliable things and that the death of a drive is a rare occurrence. Theyre not. Theyre actually pretty delicate.

These questions were answered based on seven data sets gathered from high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, warranty data, and empirical failure data from ISPs. The results might surprise you.
To answer the first question, Schroeder and Garth examined data from one HPC installation and two ISPs. They found that the root cause of node downtime or failure was due to hard disk drive failure in a high percentage of cases; hard drives were one of the top three components to fail across those three data sets, with failure rates ranging from 18.1 percent to 49.1 percent.

On top of it, recent demands for more space and quicker moves to market have really driven down the quality of consumer level drives. More than a few models are being shipped with some big problems that are either addressed via firmware updates or are just left to die in the warranty period. Now toss in the fact that Joe Consumer almost never did 24/7 read/writes but now is likely to do thanks to bittorrent, he is better off with an enterprise level drive or at least RAID1. The consumer drive that shipped with his machine wasnt really designed to be left on doing read/writes.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:14 PM on December 25, 2009

Set up a control: Hang out in a Best Buy or Apple Store. If you emit any dangerous vibes, you'll know soon enough.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:15 PM on December 25, 2009 [3 favorites]

Forget these wise-crackers. They're telling you to go retail shopping.

The Pauli Effect may or may not be real, but it definitely should be explored.

Don't let these loudmouths hinder your curiousity.
posted by at the crossroads at 10:39 PM on December 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

If you're looking for a definite answer, avoid frauds and cranks at all cost, remain skeptical, and experiment so that you can eliminate variables and unknowns. Whatever cause remains, however improbable, is at least likely.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:57 PM on December 25, 2009

My father (a retired engineer) told me that the Pauli Effect was real. When he worked for RCA in the 1970s, he said that certain people "had an electrical field around them") and would cause the computer (one of the early mainframes) to go haywire when they were in proximity. Early computers didn't have the shielding around their componants the way most present-day computer equipment does, so perhaps it was more vulnerable if certain people did indeed have a stronger or negatively charged electrical field around them, wore something that generated static, etc. His solution (at the time) was to simply ban certain individuals from the computer room.
posted by bunky at 8:24 AM on December 26, 2009 [1 favorite]

at the crossroads: Why the name-calling?

We can use your experience as another example for how the OP could perform an experiment using the scientific method. If, after this happened, you had formed a hypothesis ("my heightened emotional state is causing my body to emit an unusual magnetic field that is disrupting the electronics in that room") you could have immediately tested it, perhaps by entering and exiting the room a few more times, or trying other rooms.

I agree that the OP's curiosity is good, as curiosity is the root of all learning. The scientific method can help you translate curiosity into knowledge. Do not mistake speculation for curiosity. Do not mistake speculation for knowledge.
posted by fritley at 8:27 AM on December 26, 2009

My mom used to joke that she had a magnetic personality, because for a while all of the credit cards in her purse were demagnetizing. There was nothing in her purse that should have caused it, but it eventually stopped.
posted by IndigoRain at 11:32 AM on December 26, 2009 [1 favorite]

are you a cigarette smoker? the fine particles in cigarette smoke are small enough to get sucked into a drive and can cause its early demise.
posted by kimyo at 12:21 PM on December 26, 2009

I had an unfortunate habit of placing my external backup drives on top of my subwoofer that caused a lot of early hard-drive demises. Maybe just check for sources of excess vibration near wherever you're keeping your computer or external hard drives.
posted by Jacen Solo at 12:27 PM on December 26, 2009

No.
posted by chairface at 4:23 PM on December 26, 2009

>
Take a big magnet to your hard drive and then come back to me.
posted by at the crossroads at 2:01 AM on December 28, 2009