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

Vibration is probably the worst

[stevew]

Vibration is probably the worst enemy to the drive since it can send the head crashing into the drive surface. Modern drives have a pretty high shock rating, but this is substantialy reduced if they're operating. Even then they are considerably better than they were even 5 years ago.

That being said - head is more an issue for the drive electronics than it would be for the physical drive.

Summary - drives have moving parts - they wear out for lots of reasons. Vibration and heat should be avoided to prolong their service life.

Vibration

[TheCrimsonUnbeliever]

Vibration is the killer - knocking heads about all the time - Heat is something that can be bad - but only in extremes (70 C+)

Move the fan - Or screw it in better to kill the vibration

Solution: Don't use front fans

[Tuxinatorium]

A single 120mm fan, or two 80mm fans in the back, in addition to the power supply fans, are enough to provide plenty of air circulation and keep everything well below temperature tolerances, unless your case's front ventilation passages suck. I don't understand why the heck people try and put 5 or 6 loud fans in their case to drop the operating temperatures from 34 degrees to 30 degrees when the damn things were made to operate up to and above 50 degrees.

PS: For those who can't grasp the obvious, yes, I'm talking celcius here. The Imperial system should be abolished because it's so damn inefficient to work with. But that's another rant for another day.

trick question

[Anonymous Coward]

Trick question... heat is vibration.

Don't worry about either

[KevinIsOwn]

The problem probably was niether vibration nor heat. Harddrives are made so that they can withstand high g-forces. Some review sites have said you could throw a harddrive against a wall while it is running and it would be fine. How true this is, I don't know, but I know fan vibrations are no where near large enough to cause a problem. While continued fan virbrations theoretically could be bad, fans don't vibrate all that much. I've used fans missing fins (don't ask!) that virbrate like crazy and never had problems (Not for long though, I generally replace those with non-broken fans)

Heat is one of those things computer geeks fear most. We all want to get it as low as possible. Well let me tell you a little something about harddrive heat: Unless you have a drive spinning at 10,000 rpm or higher, you really have nothing to worry about. If HDD's weren't meant to withstand a bit of heat then you would be hearing about a lot of unhappy customers. My hdd's are warm to the touch, but that is fine, they are well within the limits. Now if it burns your finger when you touch it, then you are probably going to be having problems with all the other components in your computer as well.

Harddrives die. And they die often. If you haven't had one die in a long time, then you have been very lucky. I've had 3 drives die on me in the last 2 years. Granted 2 were IBM Deathstars, the third was a different brand. They weren't all that hot and they did not have any fans vibrating near them too much either. They just die, HDDs are not as reliable as many of us would like. (Can't wait for solid state hdd's :) )

If you decide that everything I have just said is crap and want to take the paranoid way out, that's fine! You know what they say: Better safe than sorry!

So here's what you should do:
1. Get some grommets for that fan. They will reduce fan vibrations to practically nothing. They'll also make the fan quieter too! You can pick these up from PCMods: http://www.pcmods.com/details.asp?ProdID=20
2. Get a HDD cooler. They will cool your hdd a lot more than a fan that's blowing air over it will. While I'm at the pcmods site, I might as well link there. If you shop around you will probably find better prices. Lower end cooling solution: http://www.pcmods.com/details.asp?ProdID=46 Higher end: http://www.pcmods.com/details.asp?ProdID=452 (Even has an LCD!)

I just want to stress this again: You don't NEED these two products unless you have an ultra-fast SCSI hdd. Your hdd should be well within its limits with some small vibrations and a bit of heat. But if you want to spend some money, I'm not about to stop you!

Re:Don't worry about either

[twilightzero]

*Insert standard disclaimer: I work for Western Digital tech support*

Gee what's your name? I'll be sure to put a note in your case file in the WD call tracking system that you intentionally damage your drives and should never receive an RMA again ;) That point aside, an error code is NOT at all required to RMA a drive. Quite often we get people calling with drives that won't run diags at all, in which case it's ridiculous to require a code. We WILL encourage ppl to run diags if we think it may be a problem not with the drive itself. A classic scenario is someone receiving bad sector warnings from Scandisk. This definitely does not mean the drive has bad sectors, only that scandisk can't read the data at those points (most likely the result of corrupt data). Besides, you can always do an RMA through the web site, which doesn't require any type of code - there's a field for it but you can just leave it blank.

Now on to the main topic, the problem you had here was definitely heat. Only an electronics failure would cause the drive to run in PIO instead of DMA like that - if it was a physical failure with the platters or somesuch caused by vibration, the drive would run at DMA but you'd get no data. Possibly the asic that controls data transfer got a bit fried and was no longer able to signal at top speed. Instead of quitting outright, the drives are all backward compatible all the way down to PIO1 and such and are programmed to drop their transfer speeds down if they encounter a problem at the higher speeds. So logically, (if...she...weighs the same as a duck...wait wrong explanation...) this particular one was probably a heat problem.

Now, let me touch on a few more I saw floating around in this thread:

1) No, do NOT throw a HD against the wall while running, your data will be gone faster than you can hear the clunk.

2) It doesn't matter what orientation you have the drive mounted at, just so long as it's mounted SECURELY (read: 4 screws and to a metal enclosure that's grounded).

3) Vibration is BADBADBAD for a drive. While it may not cause outright failure immediately, it will cause a huge number of misreads and retries on the drive, thereby slowing down the overall performance of the drive. This is one of the things that's driving the overall industry move to fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) - they cause much less vibration and therefore contribute to the logevity of the drive. And if the vibration is getting bad, it WILL cause the heads to touch the platters momentarily. Now the drives are designed with this in mind and have an extremely thin (several atoms) layer of lubrication on the platters. But don't encourage it if you value your data.

Any other questions you want answered, drop me an email :)