Is commuting via bicycle with a full-sized Samsung 17” laptop a good idea?

Question

It's that time of the year when the weather is nice enough for me to cycle into work and back, and since last year I have acquired a new laptop that I use for work on the daily. The laptop does not have a solid state drive; it uses a conventional hard disk drive.

Being as paranoid as I am about data loss/damage, I’m concerned about the possibility that my laptop—and its hard drive—could be damaged during my commute in and out of work. Reading into the topic, I’ve learned that it is advised cyclists needing a laptop that will be safe during commute use smaller laptops and ultrabooks as opposed to full sized laptops, and my laptop is far from either of those things: It's a 17” Samsung laptop complete with a DVD drive. It fits in the compartment that rests on my back in my backpack.

I cycle very fast, and some of the roads I cycle on have bumps, cracks, and the like- Making for a bit of a bumpy ride sometimes. I’m confident enough that I won’t wipe out and damage my laptop that way, but could it end up being damaged from being on my back while cycling at around 25-35 KM/H?

Answer 1

If this laptop was made in the past 10 years, I think you are generally in good shape. But as the answer @krowe links to conveys, the biggest risk would be to your laptop’s screen. The bigger the screen, the greater the chance you could crack if something happens. And replacing a screen like that is not easy, not cheap and basically might “total” the machine if the screen is busted.

The hard drive itself should be fine. I know some would feel more confident to be mobile with SSD drives, but I generally believe that modern hard drives are far more crash-proof than they were in the past.

That said, there is one thing a spinning drive might be susceptible to: Sudden gyroscopic changes in orientation and causing you to suddenly lose your own orientation while holding the drive.

Remember, a hard drive is basically just a small stack of spinning metal disks. So if you are the kind of person who likes to put their laptop to sleep and then moving elsewhere, you might want to change those habits. I would recommend only sleeping the laptop when you are not running or cycling around with it. And when you do end up having to hit the road on two wheels, be sure to completely shut the system down. Yes, many systems park the drive heads when going into “sleep” mode, but some to different degrees than others. I honestly don’t trust “sleep” mode as a generic safety net without knowing system specifics of how “sleep” mode actually functions.

My fear of gyroscopic orientation issues comes from the two times in my 20+ career I have lost hard drives from dropping them. Both incidents occurred when I quickly had to pull out a drive from something but did not wait the 5-10 seconds needed to let the spinning drive fully come from a rest. My quickly standing up and turning around—all while holding an expensive gyroscope in my hands—resulted in me losing my grip, dropping the drive and losing data.

Happily I had backups of the data in question, but if this is a working system you rely on it’s your choice whether the convenience of putting the system to sleep for a quick “wake” later on is worth the risk of possibly dropping the machine while the disk is spinning and you lose it’s grip while bicycling.

Yes, that gyroscopic concern could seem like an exaggerated risk if it’s just in your backpack, but it’s still the only edge-case scenario I would personally be concerned about.