What's Worse for Hard Drives: Heat or Vibration? 146
gottabeme asks: "I turned on my computer the other day and all of a sudden the BIOS said the S.M.A.R.T. status was "Bad: backup and replace." The drive has continued working in PIO mode (instead of DMA) long enough for me to get a new drive and copy everything over. When I finished copying and put the new drive in the cage where the old one was, I realized that the fan at the front of the cage which was keeping the drive cool to the touch was causing a fair amount of vibration to be transferred to the hard drive. The other 7200rpm drive without a fan was pretty warm, but had no vibration at all.
The bad drive is only a few years old, and I've never had a drive fail on me in around 10 years of computer use, until now. And until I got this case and drive I'd never had a fan blowing on a drive before. Who knows what caused the problem, but all this has made me wonder: Which is worse for a hard drive? Heat that's fairly warm to the touch, or constant vibration from a case fan right next to it? Any readers care to offer their experiences and knowledge?"
Vibration is probably the worst (Score:5, Informative)
That being said - head is more an issue for the drive electronics than it would be for the physical drive.
Summary - drives have moving parts - they wear out for lots of reasons. Vibration and heat should be avoided to prolong their service life.
Re:Vibration is probably the worst (Score:2)
That's not to say that fan vibration is not a problem. It indeed may be. The vibration, though small, won't have enough displacement to crash a head, but it could be enough to induce excess wear on the bearings in the drive. This in turn could cause the platters (or the head) to wobble or bind, eventually leading to seek errors, even a head crash. (Think: if the platter's wobbling, the data's physically not where it should be.)
But no, fan vibration won't directly cause a head crash.
Probably the best solution is to look for a smooth-running fan and shock mount it.
Re:Vibration is probably the worst (Score:1)
The person is interested in the vibration from cooling fans.
What about the 300+ watt surround sound systems with mega sub woofers playing mp3's, dvd's, etc?
Are there natural resonating frequencies to be avoided? Or just low bass frequencies in general?
I believe there may have been a previous "ask slashdot" that attempted to address this issue.
Vibration (Score:4, Informative)
Move the fan - Or screw it in better to kill the vibration
Re:Vibration (Score:2)
In many cases that just couples the vibration to the chassis better. However, if the fan is vibrating the hard drive severely enough to cause damage then there is something wrong with the fan.
Re:Vibration (Score:1)
Of course, if you have the time, you can use this same principle to isolate the drive, or drive cage, from the chassis.
Doing this could not only reduce the vibration experienced by your drives, but you can probably reduce noise.
Sorry for the vague post.
Re:Vibration (Score:3, Informative)
nice bright yellow polyurethane Silentblocs?
Re:Vibration (Score:1)
Heat vs. Vibration (Score:2, Interesting)
However, I believe that the cause of this was overwork and stress on an old and rather weak drive. Have you recently put excessive stress (such as copying entire file systems) on the drive? In all, it seems that heat hasn't played a major factor in disrupting quality in my experiences.
Silly question (Score:3, Informative)
The other thing is newer drives seem to be quite a bit more prone to failure than drives even 5 years ago, don't know if that is because of cost reduction, or higher speeds
Re:Silly question (Score:2)
Since the 8.6Gb one I don't trust single hard drives as a reliable storage medium anymore (ie I backup all my mp3's onto CDs). Daniel
Re:Silly question (Score:1)
Re:Silly question (Score:1)
Re:Silly question (Score:2)
Daniel
Re:Silly question (Score:1)
Re:Silly question (Score:2)
Heat/Vibration (Score:1)
Re:Heat/Vibration (Score:1)
Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:5, Insightful)
PS: For those who can't grasp the obvious, yes, I'm talking celcius here. The Imperial system should be abolished because it's so damn inefficient to work with. But that's another rant for another day.
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:1)
On a logarithmic scale, I certainly hope. Otherwise, why did the 10 year old Full Height SCSI server drive I dug out of the old parts bin at my college work, considering parts of it outputted enough heat to burn me?
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
My drives are cooled by 3 small (40mm) fans right in front of the drive itself. It's a mounting bracket for 3.5 inch (88.9 mm) drives to fit in 5.25 inch (133.35 mm) drive bay and includes the fans in the bracket assembly. The temperature drop on these is enormous, going from "can't touch for more than 2 seconds" to "can hardly tell if they are on". It's more like a drop from 70 degrees (158 F) to 20 degrees (68 F). Fortunately the vibration is quite small (can only hear it, not feel it) and I haven't had a drive die in these assemblies, yet (9 drives total across 5 machines going 3 years now).
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
The problem is the cases are too small and don't even have a place to put a fan in the back. And even then, there would be the problem that there are too many holes in the front which are not in front of the drives.
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:1, Offtopic)
Celsius temperatures are just a hack to make it easier for people to switch from the standard systems.
If you are going to be a measurement elitist, go all the way and add 273.16 to all celsius measurements.
PS For those who can't grasp the obvious, yes, I'm talking Kelvin here.
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:1)
The Celcius scale is more straightforward than the Farenheit scale, while the Kelvin scale is more tedious to work with. If you need a really stable scale that won't change appreciably in different environments then Kelvin is the scale of choice.
Hence, for accurate measurements & calculations we use Kelvin but for everyday work, ie. "reflux solution at 120degC", we use Celcius. Another reason no one in science uses pounds/ounces or feet/yards because it is easier to work with units that follow a base 10 system.
And what is the problem with having a system of measures designed by committee? That doesn't mean that there isn't good reasoning behind most of the choices!
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:1)
As for all the other units, using imperial is just a boneheaded and stubborn refusal to accept a more universal and practical system.
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
Much like a blind pig sometimes finding an acorn, sometimes committees get things right. Or do you think that making an inch dependent on the size of 3 seeds (why 3? why not 1, 2, or 5?) and making a foot 12 of those (why not 10? why not 14?) and a mile based on 52xx of those is the only logical why to do it? The metric system's advantage is that it is based on easily remembered numbers (water freezes at 0, boils at 100), and on powers of 10. The only reason it seems hard is that we aren't taught it when we are kids, so we try to translate it as we go.
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
The rigidity of the metric system leads to absurd units... a cup is like 253 mL, 1/3 of a liter is 333 mL, etc...
The units may seem trivial, but really make intuitive sense. a foot is roughly the length of a man's forearm. customary units are designed to be divided or cut into fractional parts. people think in terms of "one-half" or "two-thirds" not
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
and the use of both systems at the same time yields to planetary probes losses and all (zillions USD worth)
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:1)
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:2)
Keeping your drive at room temperature significantly extends its service life. This is why people make cases like this.
Re:Solution: Don't use front fans (Score:1)
(Bow) (Bow )We're not worthy! We're not worthy!
I'm sure it depends (Score:1)
My experience has been heat (Score:4, Informative)
The new Cheetah 15.3 drives are double the density per platter, faster, give off less noise and dissipate less heat then previous generations. Less heat dissipation is the most impressive attribute moving forward. Any time you do see fast server drives implemented by vendors or in storage cabinets you notice the ventilation is superior, and that they suggest operating them in environments under 80 degrees F. (I prefer 72, low humidity).
The asics and electronics on the drive probably like cold temperatures rather than low vibration, and the speed of the platter's rotation created a gyroscopic effect meaning you would have to jar the drive well beyond the specified maximum (hard drive manuals list a maximum G shock while in operation). If you are vibrating the dive out of the specified limits, most likely a conservative figure, you are essentially intentionally trying to damage the disk.
Re:My experience has been heat (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree! I once mounted a 40GB drive 180 degrees (in the last possible space in a small case) instead of just buying a new case. It died in about a month, I presume due to the grease settling the wrong way, and no longer lubricating the bearings, indirectly increasing the heat.
So these days, I won't mount a hard drive at 90 degrees either. It's worth $60 for a new case, to ensure they are mounted at 0 degrees.
Vibration is worse (Score:1)
trick question (Score:5, Funny)
My take (Score:1)
Leakage of inert gas inside. A well-made drive can endure heat and vibiration you mentioned, but it can't stand a single day after its gas leakage(can live a week if the leakage is not severe).
The cause of it might be extreme mishandling, but most of the case is the faults in the manufacturing process.
Re:My take (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My take (Score:1)
Hmmm, I guess there are two types of drives then. A former supervisor of mine flew an experiment on a NASA U-2. The drives had to be in a pressure box, even though we were still a ways from the vacuum of space. The problem was that the HD's cases would bulge, just enough to screw up head tracking.
Re:My take (Score:2, Informative)
It is the lower of density in the atmosphere.
Remember, HD heads "fly" above the platter -- if the air pressure (density) is too low, the head does not produce enough lift and will crash.
Most HD specs will list an altitude or pressure range where operation of the drive is supported.
Are you smoking the crack? (Score:1)
Hah hah! (Score:1)
...you were just being facetious, weren't you?
Heat or Vibration? Neither! (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't know for sure... (Score:2)
RAID. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had way too many hard drives fail in my lifetime. (Three).
And I'm only 19.
What a sad, sad, world.
So, yeah.
Re:RAID. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RAID. (Score:1)
Raid 0 is not real Raid
Umm, that is completely false. RAID(Redundant Array of Inexpesive Disks) has multiple levels (1-7), multiple combinations(1+0 or 0+1), and all of them are valid RAID configurations by definition.
That doubles the speed of data transfer, by using 2 HDD, and pretending its one.
BTW: You can use any number of disks(implementation specific) and do RAID 0 (I have 4 disk RAID 0 sets at work).
You probably need Raid 0+1, which has speed benefits, and redundancy. It means of course 4 HDD, all identical
RAID 10(1+0) is better because you stripe the mirror sets instead of mirroring the stripes. You can have only 1 drive fail in a 0+1 scenario (one disk fails and the mirror fails over to the other stripe). In a 1+0 scenario you can have 2 drives fail (as long as they are on different mirrors).
Re:RAID. (Score:1)
Re:RAID. (Score:1)
Unless you can restore your volume somehow, you will lose all the drives that are raided together, since, surprise, you have absolutely no redundancy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:RAID. (Score:2)
Rather, it means "not really raid" in terms of, it's not actually (r)edundant -- you only get a speed increase (from striping) without redundancy. (Obviously,t his interpretation makes more sense than my lapse in memory).
Because I didn't stop for a second to look up my usage (as, obviously, I would before building a raid configuration), no fewer than FIVE people corrected me (no one wrote anything else) on this one number (writing zero for one), including one who said that my bad luck is surpassed only by my stupidity. (Not knowing that MIRRORED raid is raid 1 and STRIPED raid is raid 0, off the top of your head, you STUPID goddamn MORON. I hope you get FIRED for your gross INCOMPTENCE. YOU, sir/madam, are a professional LIABILITY.)
Yeesh.
So, yeah: I love slashdot.
I love you I love you I love you.
Don't worry about either (Score:4, Informative)
The problem probably was niether vibration nor heat. Harddrives are made so that they can withstand high g-forces. Some review sites have said you could throw a harddrive against a wall while it is running and it would be fine. How true this is, I don't know, but I know fan vibrations are no where near large enough to cause a problem. While continued fan virbrations theoretically could be bad, fans don't vibrate all that much. I've used fans missing fins (don't ask!) that virbrate like crazy and never had problems (Not for long though, I generally replace those with non-broken fans)
Heat is one of those things computer geeks fear most. We all want to get it as low as possible. Well let me tell you a little something about harddrive heat: Unless you have a drive spinning at 10,000 rpm or higher, you really have nothing to worry about. If HDD's weren't meant to withstand a bit of heat then you would be hearing about a lot of unhappy customers. My hdd's are warm to the touch, but that is fine, they are well within the limits. Now if it burns your finger when you touch it, then you are probably going to be having problems with all the other components in your computer as well.
Harddrives die. And they die often. If you haven't had one die in a long time, then you have been very lucky. I've had 3 drives die on me in the last 2 years. Granted 2 were IBM Deathstars, the third was a different brand. They weren't all that hot and they did not have any fans vibrating near them too much either. They just die, HDDs are not as reliable as many of us would like. (Can't wait for solid state hdd's :) )
If you decide that everything I have just said is crap and want to take the paranoid way out, that's fine! You know what they say: Better safe than sorry!
So here's what you should do:
1. Get some grommets for that fan. They will reduce fan vibrations to practically nothing. They'll also make the fan quieter too! You can pick these up from PCMods: http://www.pcmods.com/details.asp?ProdID=20 [pcmods.com]
2. Get a HDD cooler. They will cool your hdd a lot more than a fan that's blowing air over it will. While I'm at the pcmods site, I might as well link there. If you shop around you will probably find better prices. Lower end cooling solution: http://www.pcmods.com/details.asp?ProdID=46 [pcmods.com] Higher end: http://www.pcmods.com/details.asp?ProdID=452 [pcmods.com] (Even has an LCD!)
I just want to stress this again: You don't NEED these two products unless you have an ultra-fast SCSI hdd. Your hdd should be well within its limits with some small vibrations and a bit of heat. But if you want to spend some money, I'm not about to stop you!
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:2)
Well, they're dead wrong. I kicked a computer about 2 weeks ago while it was turned on. One of the hard disks failed, ended up with lots of bad sectors, plus it lost all the data we had on it. So no, they won't be fine, altough at least it wasn't rendered completely useless.
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:2)
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:5, Informative)
Gee what's your name? I'll be sure to put a note in your case file in the WD call tracking system that you intentionally damage your drives and should never receive an RMA again
Now on to the main topic, the problem you had here was definitely heat. Only an electronics failure would cause the drive to run in PIO instead of DMA like that - if it was a physical failure with the platters or somesuch caused by vibration, the drive would run at DMA but you'd get no data. Possibly the asic that controls data transfer got a bit fried and was no longer able to signal at top speed. Instead of quitting outright, the drives are all backward compatible all the way down to PIO1 and such and are programmed to drop their transfer speeds down if they encounter a problem at the higher speeds. So logically, (if...she...weighs the same as a duck...wait wrong explanation...) this particular one was probably a heat problem.
Now, let me touch on a few more I saw floating around in this thread:
1) No, do NOT throw a HD against the wall while running, your data will be gone faster than you can hear the clunk.
2) It doesn't matter what orientation you have the drive mounted at, just so long as it's mounted SECURELY (read: 4 screws and to a metal enclosure that's grounded).
3) Vibration is BADBADBAD for a drive. While it may not cause outright failure immediately, it will cause a huge number of misreads and retries on the drive, thereby slowing down the overall performance of the drive. This is one of the things that's driving the overall industry move to fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) - they cause much less vibration and therefore contribute to the logevity of the drive. And if the vibration is getting bad, it WILL cause the heads to touch the platters momentarily. Now the drives are designed with this in mind and have an extremely thin (several atoms) layer of lubrication on the platters. But don't encourage it if you value your data.
Any other questions you want answered, drop me an email
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
It's interesting that you mentioned that you thought the problem was caused by heat, but the thing is, I had a fan blowing directly across the drive (mounted at the front, blowing air evenly over the top and botton of the drive). When I put my finger on top of the drive, it felt cool, as if it was not even running. That's what lead me to ask this question, as I thought vibration would be less likely to cause an electronics failure as it appears I had, but vibration seems to have been the only thing that could affect the drive, as heat was just not there.
The vibration was mild of course, but since the fan ran all the time, it was constant, so over a couple of years...it made me wonder.
(I'll e-mail this to you also, since you suggested, to make sure you see this. Thanks again for replying.)
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
A sample of one is never ever enough to conclude anything statistical. Hard drive makers fully expect to get some percentage of drives back within a certain time frame. They just attempt to balance the cost of better electronic components against the cost of RMAs within warantee periods. Now, what the move to 1 year warantees implies about this balance, is left as an exercise for the reader.
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
That's exactly why I started listing "Entropy" on my RMA forms.
WD the best, but unavailible. (Score:1)
found out today that my adsl company has no record of my order either
I'd definatly like to see an online western digital shop.
Re:WD the best, but unavailible. (Score:2)
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
Wow! I have always regarded hard drives as something of an engineering miracle. They always strike me as far more rugged than I would expect they could ever be! I guess this helps!
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:2)
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
If scandisk can't read the data, that means that the drive didn't return any. The driver or BIOS (depending on where you run scandisk from) aren't going to make any judgments about whether to pass on what they get from the controller. It means that not only does the drive have bad sectors, but it couldn't even detect the problem while the errors were still correctable and transparently remap the sector.
It's the job of the disk to keep the data from becoming "corrupt". There is nothing I can write from software which will cause scandisk to report new bad sectors.
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:2)
If you scandisk a linux or bsd partition for example, it will fail saying the sectors or even the whole disk is unreadable, which is true in the extent that scandisk scans FAT filesystems and is not finding what it expects.
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
I'm not even sure how you could instruct it to perform any tests on a non-FAT partition, as you instruct it where to work by giving it a drive letter. If there was a way, I suppose it might get confused and try to read from nonexistent sector addresses. But what kind of user would have a non-DOS partition and try to scan it with DOS tools, and then complain to the manufacturer when that failed? The comment to which I replied seemed to be saying this was a common occurrence!
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:2)
As the post above this mentions, scandisk is a filesystem check utility, not a hardware diagnostic, so it's actually quite easy to fool into thinking that there's a problem with the device when there really isn't. On the other hand, the utilities from the HD company (us, Maxtor, whoever) are decidedly NOT filesystem checkers; even more, they're totally filesystem/data independent. They check only that the hardware of the device is functioning correctly, not that the data in any given place makes sense to any given system.
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
If scandisk reports a few read errors (on a DOS partition, given the posts above), it's almost certainly a media problem. Sometimes trying to read the same bad sector several times will eventually yield correct data, especially on older drives. That doesn't mean it won't eventually degrade past the point where you can do that, or that the media will not develop the same problem in the future. The magnetic layer may still lose its polarization over time in that same spot, due to a subtle manufacturing flaw, or perhaps the track alignment will continue to drift until some areas develop read errors when not periodically refreshed.
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:3, Informative)
What happens here is actually really simple. When the drive notices a dead or dying block, it can use one of its "reserved" blocks instead, and enter the substitution into a table somewhere. Except in one case: When asked to read from a dead block, it can't just return bogus data: it has to admit that there was an error. When asked to write to a dead block, on the other hand, it can do the remapping, write to the reserved block, and nobody will ever know the difference.
It's rather counterintuitive until you think it through (or better yet, get a bad block and try it!). My intuition was that writing is "harder" on a flaky disk than reading, when in fact it's much easier for the disk to cope with a problem writing. Similarly, a problem reading is much less likely to signal a dying disk than a problem writing. A problem reading just means that there is one bad block somewhere on the disk; a problem writing probably means that all of the reserved blocks are used up (having been mapped to other bad blocks), so there's nowhere left to write.
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:2)
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:2)
Shouldn't leave any marks, and should guarantee the drive won't be able to return any codes at all.
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
Then they wouldn't be called disk drives, now would they?
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
They would revert to the old IBM name - Direct Access Storage Device (DASD).
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:1)
The non-mountable devices were/are very similar to todays harddrives. A stack of magnetically coated platters accessed via electronic heads. The fixed-head group offered remarkable performance as there was NO armature required to move the head to the correct track. Instead the device was built with one head per track. This resulted in only rotational latency. Even as 3600RPM devices, they offered concurrent access that is only approached today by RAID configurations. One the down side, they were VERY pricey and most likely consumed the same energy as a clothes dryer.
So this brings up the question, what would cost to produce a low-RPM, fixed-head harddrive for todays PC's? Given todays storage densities, it would seem the cost of the control mechanism required to correctly position the head must be a significant portion of the cost of the drive.
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:2)
That sounds about right, considering the 10 EUR difference between a 60 and a 120 G drive in the same brand/series
Re:Don't worry about either (Score:2)
One of the serious problems that solid state storage has is that the transistors which hold the data lose their capacity to store information after a few hundred thousand writes. So sorry, to date, hdd's are more reliable.
Both are bad but not really. (Score:1)
IMHO, I don't think that the conditions drives are subjected to in everyday home computers will make that much of a difference. It would take continued extremem heat or continued extreme vibrations to really affect the drives perfomance or longevity. The vibrations from an 80 mm fan would not be enough to really be a determining factor. Might be ancillary but I don't think so.
Re:Both are bad but not really. (Score:2, Informative)
Well, your half right. IDE drives are designed for MANY power on/off cycles (as the typical home or office PC is turned on and off at least once a day) but not for continuous operation. SCSI drives on the other hand are designed for continuous operation, and NOT for many power on/off cycles.
I had a Seagate 15K rpm Cheetah that recently took a dump. No special filtering, no real cooling scheme to speak off. It ran for 4 years almost to the day. Then during a load of windows, it said bye-bye. Found out the motor crapped out.
I'm willing to bet it's because you turned your PC on and off each day, and you didn't have adequate cooling. The original 15k cheetahs were DAMN hot and without active cooling, they ran above the manufacturer's operating spec. Remember, SCSI drives are designed to be in Servers where noise is not an issue, and they expect to be cooled with fans! And before some AC jumps in with a "your full of crap!" post, I'm a data storage engineer for a large storage vendor so I know what I'm talking about.
Your 15k cheetah BTW should have a 5 year warranty. Not sure if that was voided because you probably overheated it or exceded it's rated number of power on/off cycles.
Re:Both are bad but not really. (Score:1)
Re:Both are bad but not really. (Score:2)
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's bad for them, however the motor in most IDE drives is not as robust as the motor in most SCSI drives is. This is a significant portion of the additional cost of a SCSI drive (the more robust motor).
In your specific case, the motor probably crapped out due to heat. Newer drives using the fluid bearings produce less heat (and noise) but the 4 year old cheetah's have standard ball bearings. I use the Lian-Li aluminum PC cases for all 3 of my home PC's (which BTW have a mix of 10k and 15k SCSI drives - no IDE for me) due to their dual cooling fans in front of the drive bays. Even when packed with 15k drives, these fans keep them cool to the touch. (I have no affiliation with Lian-Li other than being a pleased customer.)
Heat really is a big enemy of 10k and 15k SCSI drives since they run so warm. Have a look at large enterprise storage solutions from HP, IBM, EMC, or Sun. They have dozens of very loud noisy fans blowing many many CFM of air over the drives. I used to work for Compaq/DEC and the drive carriers in their enterprise storage systems had been revised several times as faster drives became available over the years. The reason for the revisions was to provide a better cooling solution to cope with the increased heat of the faster spinning drives.
Just my personal experience here with keeping drives cool: I currently have 12 drives (10k and 15k) that I keep powered on 24/7. I've had these running for a little over two years now, and not a single failure. I attribute this partly to the good cooling that they all receive.
Good luck!
Hammers. (Score:4, Interesting)
Aside from hammers, though, heat and vibration, taken together, cause serious problems.
The systems I work on, however, have to deal more more heat than vibration. Badly made hard drive motors, such as those in late model Fujitsu hard drives, create ton of heat - you would burn yourself on them if they didn't have a fan.
If your drives are below 60 degrees celsius (hot, but you won't get burned) then you really don't need to worry about heat.
Vibration is not nearly an issue with today's computers as it was when items were socketted to printed circuit boards and connectors were manufactured to loose tolerances. Now everything is soldered, and if it isn't soldered it uses a tight connector that requires forces measured in kilograms to remove.
Vibration is rarely an issue. Even in a hard drive where magnetic and air forces keep the head microns away from the platter, vibrations are still measured in G's - not fractions of G's. Prolonged constant vibrations can cause increased wear and tear, but not by a lot. In order to make an operating hard drive crash it's heads with the vibration of a fan, you'll have to attach it to the equipment tie down point of an industrial cement kiln fan, and attach a 50lb weight to one of the blades at the edge. Even then, I'd bet on the heads not crashing before the fan bearings break. You're piddly little fan is no match for my flying head air bearing technology!
So, in short, take care of the heat first, but only if it's very hot. Don't worry about warm. If your fan is vibrating then it needs to be cleaned. If you've cleaned it and it is still vibrating, get a new fan - they aren't expensive.
If you're playing the cost tradeoff game then you're playing it wrong. When the question is "What's cheaper: a new vibration free fan, or replacing my hard drive every other year..." the answer is always the new vibration free fan.
Lastly, expect new hard drives to last exactly the length of their warranty, regardless of how you treat them. The profit margin for hard drives today is so thin that it's not worth making one that will last longer than the warranty.
-Adam
Re:Hammers. (Score:1)
But force isn't measured in kilograms, it's measured in newtons!
Re:Hammers. (Score:2)
Attention case modders: I believe we have a challenge. *g*
Question: Hard Drives used in car Mp3 Players (Score:2, Interesting)
Laptop Hard Drives?
What kind of a hard drive configuration would you use in automobiles?
Just curious,
-- Joshua
Try SpinRite (Score:2)
SpinRite Only Does FAT(32) (Score:2, Informative)
Personal Experience (Score:4, Informative)
We'll start with what lives longest.. Machines that we have in our colo's, kept under 75 degrees F, and they are very rarely moved. Some of the machines don't have physical interaction for over a year at a time. These live virtually forever.. We've had less than 1% failure rate over 5 years. We've retired more, simply because they're no longer big enough for our purposes, rather than because they've failed.
We recently shipped 20 of those old drives from New York to Los Angeles, via FedEx. They were all working at the time they were shut off, and packed in a shipping crate. I've only tested 4 so far. 2 were completely dead.. One wouldn't spin up. The other spun, but "knock"ed, and was completely worthless. The other two worked fine. So, the physical abuse of just being shipped was enough to kill them.
Now, consider the drives that haven't been in nice colo conditions. Some have been in offices where the staff seems to think 80 degrees is cold. At 80 degrees F, we have something like a 25% failure rate over 1 year. 25% of the machines will have a drive failure in a year. I can only name off two machines in that environment that haven't had a drive failure in 5 years, one of them being an extraordernarly cooled case (6 case fans, plus 2 small fans on each drive).
In one environment, the staff insisted on keeping the temp at 90 F.. This was mostly because they knew the machines would fail at about 90 F, and they didn't have to work if their workstations crashed. Funny, that business went bankrupt.. Besides over a 30% drive failure rate, they also managed to cook the rest of the parts rather randomly. Motherboards would simply stop working, power supplies would get toasted, and CPU's with good CPU fans would just drop dead.
In a computer store I worked in, when Quantum had first released their "BigFoot" drive series (5.25" wide, and maybe
There are always the rare exceptions that are always quoted as fact. One guy would tell everyone about how he has a machine with a SCSI drive running for 10 years, with no fans at all.. Ok, but it's not very good statistical sampling. A sample group of one doesn't show much.. Over hundreds, we get a better picture.
So, yes, keep your drives cool.. If you don't, it will have a shorter life span.
Don't shake your drives.. Hard impacts (less than 2" drop is enough) can destroy it, either damaging the controller board, or bumping the heads into the platters. The space is rather small (see the discussions a few months ago about removing the tops of hard drives. Smaller than a piece of dust). Constant vibration can have the same effect as a good impact. Harmonics can be evil.. Just ask any aircraft engineer.
Re:Personal Experience (Score:1)
(I remember reading a computer column where the author said something along the lines that every time she had any computer problem, everyone always attributed it to the Bigfoot drive, no matter what the problem was!)
--RJ
Re:Personal Experience (Score:2)
That's probably why they stopped making them.. From what I heard, the big platters were a bad thing.. They were so wide and thin, they could bump into each other pretty easily.. A little harmonic vibration, or physical bumping was hard on them.. But, they looked good.
One Vote for Vibration (Score:1)
My experience (Score:2)
I just lost an almost-new 60GB Deskstar because the power screwdriver I used to mount it slipped, and spun into the drive with a hard smack (one of those 1 in million chances). Six bad sectors. Hard drive utilities identify it as physical damage. I have also dropped a drive here and then in my years, and while most of them worked fine afterwards, the only ones that didn't were attributed to a recent jolt right after it was proven to work fine. Even the old MFM drives.
Heatsink (Score:2)
With an angled heatsink, you get dissipation without vibration - enough that the internal circulation of the case should be able to take care of the rest.
Superstitions (Score:3, Insightful)
From the end-user's point of view, it's all random and there's not much that can be done about it.
You can't convince me that a well-engineered drive has such a thin margin of safety that it will have a long life at 70 degrees and fail frequently at 80 degrees. (If temperature is that much MORE critical for drives than for other components, then why don't PC's have better cooling systems and overtemperature warnings? And why are they designed to let drives be mounted in close proximity to each other?)
You can't convince me that a drive that is doing so many seeks that it is making fizzing, buzzing head-seeking noises most of the day, creating its OWN vibrations) is going to drop dead because the fan next to it isn't vibration-free.
Because the mind abhors a knowledge vacuum, we all create our own superstitions about drive life. OUR drives won't fail because WE (pick one) a) keep our systems powered 24 hours a day to prevent power-on stress, b) religiously turn off our systems when not in use to keep down operating hours, c) open the case and vacuum out dust and clean air filters every 60 days, d) NEVER open the case because it's human handling that does the mischief, etc. etc.
Don't blame the victim. Drives just fail and it's not your fault.
Apples. (Score:2)
Hard drives are a source of vibration? (Score:2)