What's Worse for Hard Drives: Heat or Vibration?

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?"

Comments

easy answer

[fateswarm]

"What's Worse for Hard Drives: Heat or Vibration?"

CAPACITY!

Re:Solution: Don't use front fans

[duffbeer703]

Give me a break. The metric system is a system of measures designed by committee.

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.