U2 song whacks Acer Aspire One netbook hard drives

We’re not entirely sure how serious to take this, but apparently Acer’s hugely popular 8.9-inch Aspire One netbook will trash the hard drive if you play music through it too loudly according to some users on HardwareCult. One of the tracks it has taken a particular dislike to is U2’s Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me, which several users have been able to replicate the problem with.

Ultimately, the drive will undergo “complete catastrophic failure, talking with it all the user’s data“, according to Tigre Marino who made the original claim. The result is “read errors, ATAPI errors on the system log, and even logging Raw Read Errors on the hard drive’s SMART health monitoring system.”

“You’ll see, after some seconds, the hard drive LED will get stuck and the machine could freeze or get a BSOD. Lower the volume or plug in some headphones and the problem magically disappears,” Tigre said.

It’s unknown what causes the problem. Is excessive vibration to blame? Does the video emit a frequency that causes part of the HDD to resonate? Is it simply electrical or magnetic interference? Others have suggested that when the speakers are on full, the HDD received insufficient power. All of the users that reported this were running XP rather than Linux and had hard-disk drives rather than solid-state drives. For those that dare to try it themselves, the U2 video can be found here.