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In my 1.5 years at a fairly small company, I've dealt with 3-4 damaged hard drives (bad blocks mostly). Out of the 4-5 servers and 8 desktops, that's a very large percentage. Many of the drives were not past their lifespan - so the failures were unexpected. I've learned that before my time, there were several catastrophic failures to hard drives as well.

I've started wondering if this might be due to the local train's vibration. The train is roughly 100ft away from the building and the building does vibrate when it passes. It goes by fairly often - at least every half hour. I've also thought about electrical instability or magnetic interference but the train does seem like a more plausible concern.

Any ideas?

user1389579
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Yes this is possible especially, when the vibrations is strong enough. Imagine a needle on a record player bouncing around if you were trying to drive across town and play an LP at the same time. The same thing is about hard drives so it's possible that the train has caused the problem because of the vibrations.

As there aren't many good anti-shock-packs for internal harddisks, it will be hard to find a solution for this.

But many laptop vendors have implemented this technology under different names:

  • HDAPS, Hard Drive Active Protection System, by Lenovo (originally designed by IBM)
  • Sudden Motion Sensor by Apple Inc.
  • GraviSense by Acer
  • 3D DriveGuard, HP Mobile Data Protection System 3D and ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection by HP
  • Free Fall Sensor (FFS) by Dell
  • HDD Protection by Toshiba
Christian
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