PC Hard Drive Sensors Warn of Tsunamis

And I thought I’d never get to use “tsunami” in a blog post… but indeed, in the random yet wicked-cool technology news category today is an article about someone using the read/write head sensor in hard drives to detect tsunamis. To quote:

As part of their operation, hard disks measure vibrations in order to keep the read-write head of the disk on track. These measurements can be read from some hard disks. The Tsunami Harddisk Detector captures this vibration data and shares it with computers in other locations connected via a peer-to-peer network to determine whether an earth tremor is occurring.
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If an earthquake that could lead to a tsunami is detected, the supernodes inform the other nodes. Computers running the client software and connected to the peer-to-peer network can then warn of such events.
The software is able to provide such warnings because the seismic waves produced by earthquakes travel at about 5,000 kilometers per hour, while tsunamis move much slower at 500 to 1,000 kilometers per hour, Stadler explains on his Web site. The speed difference leaves time to evaluate tremors and, if necessary, warn of a tsunami.

I love random stuff like this! Anyway, you may now return to your regularly scheduled game-industry news surfing.

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