I vaguely recall a (probably apocryphal) story of an early washing machine-sized hard drive that lurched its way across the floor during a customer demo, eventually falling over once the connecting cables pulled taught.

That said, those hard drives did indeed move themselves: http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html

Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.

I love the Jargon File

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