Dropsies-What's the worst you've dropped a hard drive onto a hard surface

[Seeker47]

Don't wish to infringe on resident pollster yoda313's territory here (and he does a fine job of it !), but I'm wondering: what's the worst you've dropped a hard drive onto a hard surface and had it (seemingly) escape unscathed ? Despite my best efforts, I've done this a couple times over the past two or three years. First time, it was an 80G drive, dropped about 2 1/2 feet., and I got away with that one, but I retired the drive from service about 6 months later anyway, more due to insufficient capacity than as a precaution. Just the other day, I dropped a 120G drive about 1 foot. I'm hoping I'll be lucky there as well, but won't know for awhile. (These are spare boot drives that I rotate for backup.)

Do you think the SMART monitoring will reveal whether there is a problem or not, with a high degree of reliability ?

I'd like to hear about your close calls . . . .

[redwudz]

As long as the HDD isn't running it can usually survive a drop of a couple of feet, though it may depend on what side it lands on. When it's shut down, the heads are 'parked' and shouldn't hit the platter surface. But if it's running and the heads do hit the platter, it's usually all over. I've dropped a couple of HDDs over the years about 3 feet to a carpeted floor and they seemed to survive.

I saw this at a Fujitsu HDD spec sheet:

Shock:
Operating 2,940 m/s² (300 G) 2ms
Non-operating 8,820 m/s² (900 G) 1ms

900 G's is quite a bit of force.



And Seeker47, in the future please use a more descriptive subject title in your posts to allow others to search for similar topics. I will change yours this time. From our rules:

Try to choose a subject that describes your topic.
Please do not use topic subjects like Help me!!! or Problems.

Thanks,
Moderator redwudz

[Xylob the Destroyer]

less than 2 weeks ago I dropped my C: drive about 4.5 feet onto concrete...
it was still in my Antec drive cage, which was deformed all to hell. It took me close to 20 minutes to bend the cage back into a shape that would fit back into the PC case.
Fired right up with no problems and has worked like a pro since (knock wood!).

[dphirschler]

I once let one slip from my hands (a 160 GB WD) and I quickly maneuvered my foot to try to breaks its fall. It hurt, but the drive didn't die. Not sure I'll put my foot in the way next time though.


Darryl

[Legendsk]

I've always been careful and lucky and never dropped a drive. However, a very long time ago, I strapped a hard drive to the rack over the back fender of my motorcycle and drove 100 miles without thinking about the vibration effects..... It croaked. Would spin, but was no longer a hard drive. At that time even when heads were parked, they weren't locked in the park position and I'm sure the vibration shook the heads all over the platters.
I believe now the heads are generally locked in park and the bearings will stand a huge number of G's, so drives will tolerate an amazing amount of abuse. Lack of good, clean, cool air flow and lightning strikes are the current drive killers.

[Seeker47]

I once let one slip from my hands (a 160 GB WD) and I quickly maneuvered my foot to try to breaks its fall. It hurt, but the drive didn't die. Not sure I'll put my foot in the way next time though.
Darryl

Yep, tried to do that -- wasn't fast enough though.
This last drop was right on one end, rather than flat. It was not running at the time.
I hadn't considered the vibration thing, but that would have to be an issue in earthquake country. Glad to hear there are some strong shock ratings on these things.

[neomaine]

Sorry, not a close call, but a good story (I think so anyway...)

Its 1984 and I'm working for a trust company as an operator. First time really taking care of the hardware side.

The system is a DEC PDP 11/70. Switches all over the place. Anyway, the storage was a washing machine size encloser with a hard drive pack that weighed in at around 40-50 pounds, platters about 1/4 inch thick and about 15-20 inches in diameter and a whopping 300mb (might have been 100-150mb...).

As one of my wonderful third shift responsibilities, I would change the drive in one to backup up another. To do that, you stopped the drive spinning, opened the lid to expose the drive (like we could do that now... ) and put a plastic cover over it. The cover had a handle that spun and locked the cover around the drive.

One night when carrying the drive over to the shelf, the handle broke and the drive slams to the floor. No problem, just get another cover with a good handle. Problem solved. The casing was still OK so I in turn thought "Phew, close one...".

Sure enough, next time I mounted that drive, the platters were bent ever so slight enough to cause the heads to screech across platters. Drive was lost, encloser (with the heads) had to be replaced. My boss wasn't too impressed.... it was easy for me to play dumb back then...