There's also this great example of Brendan Gregg screaming at hard disks to demonstrate exactly that sort of latency spike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

I don't know if the latency spike is caused by sensors detecting the extra vibrations and delaying a read or seek operation or if its just vibrations causing minor read-head errors which either require a 2nd pass (that isn't reported through to the OS via SMART) or some sort of extra processing to pull the correct signal out of the raised noisefloor.

Edit: person shouting at the disks is Brendan Gregg, not Bryan Cantrill.