Everything you need to know about hard drive vibration (2016) | Hacker News Reader

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

ept.ca

35 pointsasdefghyk17 comments

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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

next try shouting at a wafer stepper

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”.

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

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

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’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.

The P180 has these walls for their sound dampening properties. The material is for sure not cheaper than mild steel, which is what cheap cases are made of.

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.

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.

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

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