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I have a man cave that has to hold all my toys, so my large collection of computers with spinning hard drives is about 10 feet from my drum set. The drum set is largely idle, but my kid is now old enough to start playing, and I fear for my spinners.

Are the tolerances of WD blue hard drives such that I shouldn't worry about it?

Journeyman Geek
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Stu
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    Somebody posted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 which is interesting, but I'm not worried about latency fall off, I'm worried about actually damaging the disks with the bass drum. – Stu Jan 13 '18 at 17:33
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    For years I had a drum kit I practised on daily in my studio, with a Mac sitting less than 10 ft away, never any issue. The floor was concrete though, so no real transferred vibration via the floor. Mac was up & running throughout, not asleep or shut down. – Tetsujin Jan 13 '18 at 17:35
  • https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-771436.pdf shows that writes willl be fine with upto 30G's, however I don't know how to calculate the conversion between the 20-100hz of a bass drum, into a impact with associated g-forces. – djsmiley2kStaysInside Jan 13 '18 at 18:07
  • @Stu unless you can measure how much vibration occurs on the WD and taking distance in consideration, i'd say you will get only "an estimate" type of answers. my approach is the best informed you are the better decision you can take, here is something nice to check https://www.ept.ca/features/everything-need-know-hard-drive-vibration/ – DRP Jan 13 '18 at 18:18
  • If you are worried, get SSDs, or if thats not practical, get a NAS ready or Enterprise hard drive. These have support for handling vibration. – davidgo Jan 13 '18 at 19:13
  • I guess what I was really asking was, has anybody done drumming near a spinner (let alone a lot of spinners) such that it caused damage... Thanks for the links, I came across this: https://superuser.com/a/526929/10151 which is kinda what I'm asking about, real world case war stories. I don't know how much force a bass drum will generate and I have no easy way to test, but it sounds like I shouldn't be too worried about it. – Stu Jan 13 '18 at 23:21
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    So I asked for you over on physics, who are more capable of the weird (and interesting maths that this throws up). Basically you're safe. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/379778/how-many-gs-would-a-bass-drum-at-10-feet-away-impart-on-a-hard-drive/379822#379822 – djsmiley2kStaysInside Jan 14 '18 at 12:18
  • @djsmiley2k, you da man. – fixer1234 Jan 14 '18 at 21:52
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    The duplicate focuses on normal operational vibration & the kind of shock that would result from an impact like dropping it. This question is about the kind of vibration that results from conducted and transmitted waves of substantial power in close proximity, with frequencies that could trigger resonance in the drive. That's a different type of risk not addressed by the other question. The calculations are off-topic here, but the question & resulting answer are on-topic. I'm voting to reopen in the hope that @djsmiley2k will post an SU-suitable answer based on the thread on the Physics site. – fixer1234 Jan 14 '18 at 22:09

1 Answers1

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Do the vibrations affect the drive?
Yes

Should you worry about it?
No

As demonstrated in this YouTube video, simply shouting at a hard drive can show a visible impact on performance. The video is quite funny... you should watch it.

That being said, vibrations -- even those coming from a nearby drum set -- are considered environmental noise, and the drive is designed to deal with them. Sometimes excess vibrations can cause read errors, but the firmware on the drive contains error correction algorithms that handle those errors without you even noticing. In fact, if you were to watch in real time, you'd see that hard drives are actually recovering from small errors all the time, even under ideal conditions.

Hard drives have a specified shock tolerance -- both operating and non-operating. And while the operating tolerance is much less than the non-operating tolerance, in both cases it's measured in G-forces. I don't know how many decibels it would take to equal 1G of force, but it's waaay louder than a drum set.

Another way to look at it would be to consider a laptop hard drive. These are designed to work while the computer is sitting on your lap, in a car, on a plane, or in lots of places where the environment produces vibrations that are every bit as intense than what a drum set would produce.

In short, it'll be fine.

Wes Sayeed
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  • Heh... I didn't even notice you'd linked to that same YouTube video in one of your comments. – Wes Sayeed Jan 15 '18 at 19:32
  • *"Hard drives have a specified shock tolerance"* -- You seem to conflate shock and vibration. They are related, but are two different issues. Vibration has a frequency attribute. HDDs also have vibration specs. E.G. see https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/enterprise-hdd-fam/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd/constellation-es-4/en-us/docs/100740544d.pdf – sawdust Jan 26 '18 at 22:33