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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?

fixer1234
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1 Answers1

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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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Lister
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  • This is very informative (+1'ed). What do you think about using the laptop during travel though? You just stated it can affect write operations. Is it a good idea to not use the machine during travel? –  Aug 03 '16 at 09:06
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    I personally use my laptop on the train. If you look at the average train you will see business commuters using their Microsoft edges and their apples and all that goodness. Those laptops will most likely live long lives if they aren't dropped or have coffee split on them. There certainly hasn't been any thing news worthy, that article I linked is from a 2005 computer geek seminar! I suppose the best way to liken it to if I physically shook your chair while working, slightly and regularly. You would be slowed down, but you could still carry on what you were doing. – Lister Aug 03 '16 at 09:08
  • Microsoft Edges you mean Microsoft Surface which has a SSD not a mechanical drive? – Ramhound Aug 03 '16 at 09:29
  • @Ramhound I do and I stand corrected on the surface. – Lister Aug 03 '16 at 09:31
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    Yeah don't worry. Todays HDD can take quite a bit of bumping around. There are even ones that have accelerometers, to detect falling, which then lets snap the read/write head into a save position. And as always: take regular backups ;-). – gilgwath Aug 03 '16 at 09:46