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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
That is not just any guy though. He is the guy.
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”.
next try shouting at a wafer stepper
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?
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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
I remember when I bought my first hard drive. It held 20MB and I was sure I’d never fill it.
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
I could not get to the article, so from the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250613075332/https://www.ept.c...