Everything you need to know about hard drive vibration (2016)

https://www.ept.ca/features/everything-need-know-hard-drive-vibration/

by asdefghyk • 8 months ago

35 17 8 months ago

asdefghyk• 8 months ago

Hard Disk Drives (HDD’s) are one of the most impressive and important electromechanical devices ever created. The mechanics of HDD vibration is an obscure subject, and as a result, there is an aura of mystery surrounding vibration ...

HPsquared• 8 months ago

The numbers are always mind-boggling to me. The precision, speed and reliability, all in a cheap mass-produced object. I suppose when you compare it to the chips themselves, those are also amazing. But HDDs just seem like they should be impossible.

rubatuga• 8 months ago

Bought some 26TB HAMR drives recently. It uses solid state lasers to heat up the drive before writing. I shucked them from some Seagate external drive enclosures so we'll see how long my data will last. They're so new there's no failure data on them

nefarious_ends• 8 months ago

I recall a video of a guy temporarily reducing hard drive performance by shouting at it

edit: here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

amelius• 8 months ago

next try shouting at a wafer stepper

29athrowaway• 8 months ago

That is not just any guy though. He is the guy.

elijahwright• 8 months ago

The guy if you care about systems performance, in a detailed way, for sure!

Someone ask him how many OS kernel bugs he’s found now? He finds the weirdest things… a tally would be “interesting”.

jmclnx• 8 months ago

I could not get to the article, so from the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250613075332/https://www.ept.c...

vivzkestrel• 8 months ago

curl -I -X GET www.ept.ca/features/everything-need-know-hard-drive-vibration/ curl: (28) Failed to connect to www.ept.ca port 80 after 75027 ms: Couldn't connect to server Not using any VPNs from my end

hinkley2• 8 months ago

It seems like drives would be better off with their own built in isolation. Wonder why it doesn’t work out that way. Elasticity of the materials and the gap between the axle and the arm? Space?

rasz• 8 months ago

Some laptops, Toughbooks and Thinkpads come to mind, mounted drive on foam pads or in rubber gaskets. A lot of MFM era drives up to mid eighties used to suspend mechanical part on rubber isolated posts.

hinkley2• 8 months ago

Thinkpads also introduced accelerometers to park the heads when a laptop leaves a desk before it can hit the ground. Seems like at some point they decided the extra square millimeters were more useful for something else, like making the laptop a half a mm thinner.

jmpman2• 8 months ago

The best drive enclosures I’ve worked on used laminated steel. Steel-plastic-steel in order to absorb the vibrations. Worked great, but for some reason this isn’t widely used in the industry, as if the laminated steel guys don’t have good sales people.

ahartmetz2• 8 months ago

My main desktop computer is in an Antec P180 case. Most / all? of its outer panels are made of aluminum - plastic - aluminum material. They make a particular dull sound when knocked.

jmpman2• 8 months ago

I’m talking about drive enclosures made by storage companies. The EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP type of places. Consumer grade cases all use the cheapest sheet metal they can find.

Everything you need to know about hard drive vibration (2016)

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