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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?"
As I post this, there are 22 posts to this question. This is totally unreasonable and a waste of bandwidth.
The way I see it there should only be two posts to this.
Question: What is worse for hard drives, heat or vibration?
Post #1: Vibration.
Post #2: Heat.
That really is all of the information this guy needs. Any more is a waste of precious bandwith. Not to mention the electricity required for that bandwidth.
What's worse:
1) a bullet to the brain,
2) massive stroke
3) sex with a mare