Enlarge (credit: Western Digital)

It sounds like something out of an urban legend: Some Windows XP-era laptops using 5400 RPM spinning hard drives can allegedly be forced to crash when exposed to Janet Jackson's 1989 hit " Rhythm Nation ."

But Microsoft Software Engineer Raymond Chen stands by the story in a blog post published earlier this week , and the vulnerability has been issued an official CVE ID by The Mitre Corporation, lending it more credibility.

According to Chen, CVE-2022-38392 was originally discovered by "a major computer manufacturer," and it can affect not just the laptop playing the song but adjacent laptops from other PC companies as well. The specific hard drive model at issue—again from an unnamed manufacturer—would crash because "Rhythm Nation" used some of the same "natural resonant frequencies" that the drives used, interfering with their operation.

Enlarge / Western Digital's new 26 and 22TB hard drives. (credit: Western Digital)

Western Digital announced a raft of new products yesterday aimed at both regular consumer PCs and big businesses with storage-hungry servers. The headliners are two new hard drives with huge capacities —one 26TB and one 22TB—as well as high-capacity SSDs for servers, internal and external performance-focused WD Black SSDs, and midrange PCIe 4.0 SSDs that could end up in your next prebuilt laptop or desktop PC.

The 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 drives use tech called shingled magnetic recording, or SMR, to boost the amount of data that can fit on each platter, at the expense of performance . WD uses SMR technology across its WD Red Pro hard drive lineup, among others, which is targeted at businesses rather than home users. The WD Red Plus drives, introduced after WD was briefly caught using SMR technology in its hard drives without publicizing it , use the more traditional conventional magnetic recording (CMR) instead.

The 22TB drive does use CMR technology, boosting capacity while retaining performance. Current CMR drives mostly top out at 20TB as of this writing. Other 22TB hard drives we've seen from companies like Seagate have had to rely on SMR technology to reach that capacity. This drive will show up in many of Western Digital's product families, including the Ultrastar, WD Purple, WD Red, and WD Gold lineups. All of the new drives are expected to be available sometime this summer.