Use hard drive anti-vibration grommets or not?

[Bidule0hm]

Ok, I see, thanks ;)

But the only one thing I don't see happening is a head crash due to the position correction, can you elaborate on that please?

 

[DJ9]

Gentleman,

We're still waiting on iXsystems definitive test. Soon? :D

 

[Luminousdolphin]

They are *supposed* to be compensated for. But that compensation often requires recalibration (which the disks often do themselves).

Don't know if you know this, but when you first power on your disk and it warms up, the hard drive recalibrates itself multiple times over the first 2 hours it's powered on because as the components warm up the actual location of the data moves ever so slightly due to the temperature difference.

So yeah, there's constant calibration and such going on. That's not the *real* problem problem in my book. The *real* problem is vibrations that are so constant and consistent that the disk is having to correct for overshooting the desired sector regularly, resulting in much longer latency... or the ever worse head crash.

There has been a lot of study in this area. I have been looking into this issue as well lately.

There is an excellent paper determining how one calculates the type of bushing or grommet to use to both minimize vibration as well as avoid cyberjock's mentioned issues here: https://www.rathbun.com/pdfs/EAR-pdf/E-A-R Engineering Design Guide.pdf

Page 11, Hard Drive example.

Also, many white papers have stated that the ideal damping material for hard drives is PSA Acrylic. The double sided stuff probably isn't great, but 3m makes something called 2552 tape which I believe would be an excellent choice.

Related to cyberjocks other comment about more failures in the past... well, there's many potential reasons for that, but pertaining to the damping in particular: te issue of "outgassing" was not discussed. that may be partly the reason cyberjock experienced issues when he used other damping parts in the past.