Hard drives are pretty shock resistant these days.

[Eug]

My iMac Core i7 quad was having serious problems, so Apple agreed to get me a new one. However, the drive seemed fine so they just took the drive out and gave it to me, as an extra bonus I guess.

I had it on a table but it got bumped off, and fell almost 3 feet onto a hardwood floor. I put it in an external USB 2 / eSATA case, and it still works fine.

P.S. It continually pisses me off that consumer Macs don't support eSATA. FW 800 stuff is bloody expensive.

 

[Zap]

Notebook drives are more shock resistant than desktop drives, and non-powered drives are more shock resistant than powered drives.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Their shock ratings are extremely high, provided the drives are not running.

Running drives are very vulnerable though.

 

[Emulex]

i killed two of those $25 120gb western digital portable (in a plastic case) in the past month. previously i used old PATA drives in metal chassis external cabinets but i wanted to make things tidier (no power wire) and replaced the fleet of D2D drives.

2 drives in 1 month fail where before the 3.5" pata well those things were years old and all dented up in their cheap tin enclosures.

i'm not sure all drives are built the same?

 

[RebateMonger]

Some recent notebook disks have accelerometers that sense free-fall and park the heads.

 

[Russwinters]

They are not as resistant as you may think, you just got REALLY lucky.


Western Digitals locking mechanism on their scorpios is flawed, and they knock loose easy and the heads will become stuck to the platters. This is a common failure.


Seagate heads crash and scrape the coating of the platter away (this is the momentus)


Hitachi's heads just die. Sometimes they will do damage to the platters that is difficult to detect (a magnetic "scratch")

 

[Emulex]

thanks russ - i guess my choice of WD externals was a poor one. you have saved me much anguish.

interestingly every refurb WD i get back is 250gb ( i send them 120gb lol)

 

[Eug]

The drive was indeed parked and not spinning - no power. But yeah, I was pretty lucky.

BTW, I have one of those accelerometer-endowed drives in my MacBook Pro. It was rather disconcerting to hear it park every time I picked up the laptop. Not a free fall, but just a relatively gentle move of the laptop. It almost sounded like it was a click of death. However, I've gotten used to it now.

Anyways, this will represent my tertiary computer backup... since it won't work with my PVR. (I already use Time Machine on one backup drive, and Disk Utility clones on another backup drive.) The PVR either doesn't seem to like the Vantec Nexstar CX enclosure, doesn't like the Hitachi (which has an Apple firmware actually), or just doesn't like 2 TB drives. (Most 3rd party successes have been with 1 TB drives or smaller.)

 

[Russwinters]

Ultimately, I tell everyone I come in contact to this:


No matter what brand, mode, etc you buy.



They are ALL hard drives, and they are ALL mechanical devices with moving parts.

They ALL have a fairly equal chance to fail, some are more likely to fail in certain ways then others, but no matter how you spin it they all are susceptible to very similar mechanical failures.

Keep a backup up to date, and buy for performance, noise, or whatever you would like.


Stay away from Seagate though, those guys need to get their act together. Haha.

 

[taltamir]

Some recent notebook disks have accelerometers that sense free-fall and park the heads.

interesting info, thanks for sharing. but unless they have a battery, this will not work while the drive is unplugged (like the OP's case)... although, a lot of drives park the heads when off anyways.

 

[Russwinters]

notebook drives have been using accelerometers for a few years now.

All notebook drives use ramps for parking the heads, most desktops drives are adopting this now to, although seagate and samsung seem to not want to use ramps for their desktop drives...

 

[Emulex]

so what is the toughest 2.5" usb powered drive? do you think unplugging the drive without ejecting could cause rapid failure? (3.5" you can power down the drive using the switch then wait for spindown, then unplug usb.

thanks for any tips.

 

[taltamir]

so what is the toughest 2.5" usb powered drive? do you think unplugging the drive without ejecting could cause rapid failure? (3.5" you can power down the drive using the switch then wait for spindown, then unplug usb.

thanks for any tips.

SSD external drives.
the toughest spindle drives can sustain a shock of 300G, the toughest SSDs can sustain 5000G.

i am not sure about just unplugging it, would it have enough energy in the capacitors to park the heads? maybe, there is a good chance that it wouldn't.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

They are not as resistant as you may think, you just got REALLY lucky.

Western Digitals locking mechanism on their scorpios is flawed, and they knock loose easy and the heads will become stuck to the platters. This is a common failure.

Seagate heads crash and scrape the coating of the platter away (this is the momentus)

Hitachi's heads just die. Sometimes they will do damage to the platters that is difficult to detect (a magnetic "scratch")

Interesting information. Personal experience or...? Samsungs?

 

[frostedflakes]

Notebook drives are more shock resistant than desktop drives, and non-powered drives are more shock resistant than powered drives.

This, the drive not being on and the heads securely parked is probably what saved it. Drives aren't nearly as forgiving if you drop them while they're running and the heads aren't parked, though.

 

[RebateMonger]

...although, a lot of drives park the heads when off anyways.

I believe that all current hard drives self-park when power is removed. The heads are supposed to fly long enough for the heads to get to their parking place before they can land. No power needed for this to happen.

I'm not an expert on the insides of hard drives, but that's what I've read.

 

[Emulex]

all i know is these western digital 2.5" self powered boxes are dropping like flies. the only bad thing is unplugging them while on. since they are bus powered.