I often travel by train with my laptop which has a mechanical hard drive.
I'm careful not to use the laptop during travel since there is a constant vibration that the drive experiences throughout. The magnitude is not much, but the vibration is prolonged (18 hours at a stretch).
Can prolonged vibration slowly kill the hard drive? Should I avoid taking my laptop when traveling by train? Or, if I do not use the computer and the head and the disk do not move during this period, is it safe?
Answer
This question has had a variation before
Their conclusion, which I share appears to be that vibrations from travel are unlikely to have a significant negative impact, they are after all designed for travel.
There is a white paper on the topic. They conclude that while vibrations can have an affect on write operations, they did not come across data corruption.
The obvious source of damage for laptop hard drives will be sudden impacts (IE dropping) which could cause the reading head to impact the platter. Note how most consumer hard drives have a impact sensor, not a vibration sensor to void your warranty!
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