Don't yell at your computer!

[Squeetard]

Here is a cool video showing the effects of vibration on hard disk latency:

YouTube - Shouting in the Datacenter

I think suspending your HD's is an even better idea now. Looks like it is important to keep case vibrations away from the drives as well as drive vibration away from the case.

[sswilson]

That's pretty cool!!!!

[ImmaPC]

I think I saw an article about this one time in Maximum PC, where they showed how much HDD's can be affected by virbations in the case from fans, optical drives, and some WC pumps. They also showed an interesting technique to curbing this by suspending your HDD's in rubber bands, held in the bay by two pencils the rubber bands would wrap around. I can see how this would work, but there are a couple of problems you can get from this:

- If you use cheapo low-quality rubber bands that deteriorate with heat and time, they may snap and cause your HD's to fall, of course leading to damage to your HD's, corrupted data, etc.

- If you have a case where you have to mount your drives vertically or sideways, apparently it's much harder to suspend them using the rubber-band-and-pencil technique. Mind you, one may be able to do it sideways if they were to use bigger rubber bands, and something on either side of the HD to hold it sideways and stop it from slipping due to the elasticity of the rubber bands.

[Dr_BenD_over]

I suspect the effect on a regular user would be somewhat less than a high end raid setup like that.

[Cptn Vortex]

Dont shout at your JBOD's!

[miggs78]

Is that why my hard drives gave up on me

[enaberif]

Regardless if the hard drive is suspended or not its still going to be susceptible to vibrations.

[ImmaPC]

^^How is that? If the HD is screwed to the case, which is vibrating due to fans, optical drives, etc, only then will the vibrations reach it because they have a stiff medium they can use to get towards the HD. If you put a soft, shock absorbent medium (such as rubber in a rubber band), then the vibrations cannot reach it so easily. Of course, HD's make vibrations of their own, but then those vibrations are dampened as well by the rubber bands.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by ImmaPC

^^How is that? If the HD is screwed to the case, which is vibrating due to fans, optical drives, etc, only then will the vibrations reach it because they have a stiff medium they can use to get towards the HD. If you put a soft, shock absorbent medium (such as rubber in a rubber band), then the vibrations cannot reach it so easily. Of course, HD's make vibrations of their own, but then those vibrations are dampened as well by the rubber bands.

The keyword is "so easily"

I'm sure if they tried it they would register just not as violent.

[DarKStar]

Weird - I thought HDDs had some level of protection - I did try the experiment and nothing happened...... My case can get very loud - because I hvae 2 opticals, and 1 of them is a liteon and it gets extremely noisy and vibrates when burning at 16x~20x - even tried putting the case on a vibrating table for the case to vibrate, to test, no effect whatsoever....