What is the value/cost of enabling "spread spectrum clocking" on my hard drives?

Posted by Stu Thompson on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Stu Thompson
Published on 2010-05-08T19:49:47Z Indexed on 2010/05/08 20:00 UTC
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hdd

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sata

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storage

I'm building up a biggish NAS box (10x WD RE4 2TB SATA RAID10) and ran into some problems. During the course of my research, debugging, investigations, etc, I discovered a jumper on the physical drives labeled "spread spectrum clocking".

After some googling about this on teh internets, it seems to be a feature that some suggest (without reference or explanation) enabling in 'a storage configuration' that makes the drive less sussesptable to EMI.

But why? I've got three core questions:

Why is this feature not enabled by default?
What are the actual benefits?
Are there any costs?

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