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Thread: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

  1. #1
    Formerly known as Andehh Andeh13's Avatar
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    Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    I am in the process of finishing off a carPC. I have a proof of concept, but now need to start considering installing it permanently in my car. I am using a standard desktop SATA HDD and it is currently mounted vertically like this; |. Would I be better off having it flat, or vertically based on the bouncing movements of the car? Over the next few weeks I am going to try & fabricate a bounce minimization system but until then how would i be best mounting it?

    Thanks guys

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    DILLIGAF GoNz0's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    elastic bands in a box much larger then the drive so it can bounce about, ideal but out of your budget would be a small SSD.

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    ALT0153™ Rob_B's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    Yup, elastic bands or elasticated material from a craft shop or similar (bigger surface area & can be stitched/secured together easier.

    eg http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/4-METRES-3-4-I...item23086b72f3

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    Formerly known as Andehh Andeh13's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    I will order some and try it out next week, Is a HDD more resilient standing up or laying down?

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    DILLIGAF GoNz0's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    your better off with post office elastic bands, go for a walk and pick some up

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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    SSD; then you wouldn't need to care about the orientation or vibration.

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    Senior Member Pob255's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    This is one big advantage to SSD's over hard drives, they are nearl enough immune to vibrations.

    next best thing is suspension, although grommited screws might be better and a hard drive with drop/fall sensor.

    As to which way to face it . . . I'd guess that vertical would be better against speed humps and other vertical movement, but horizontal would be better for sideways forces caused by cornering.

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    YUKIKAZE arthurleung's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    Perhaps a 2.5" HDD? Even if a 3.5" HDD with elastic mounting you're likely to see the HDD bouncing off whatever container you're using and that is where the maximum shock going to be. You might as well rigid mount the HDD and let the car suspension deal with the shock.
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    Get a cheap SSD? You can get 64GB Patriots for about £75 now, not the best in the world but they're an SSD, therefore almost immune to shock.

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    bored out of my tiny mind malfunction's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    I'd agree that an SSD would be much better but failing that use a 2.5" HDD as it's more likely to be built with movement / vibration in mind and is lighter hence easier to damp... If budget is really tight I'd be tempted to get the cheapest 2.5" HDD you can, treat it as expendable / a prototype and see how badly it suffers... I'm quite sure the car PC pre-dates SSDs being widely available or even being half affordable.

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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    You can get automotive hard drives that are specifically designed for this sort of thing, but they're quite expensive so I'd be inclined to got for an SSD.

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    Oh Crumbs.... Biscuit's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    Have you already got the hard drive? You can get some which have shock protection to make sure the head doesn't scratch the disk if it detects movement.

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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    This is not a trivial problem, and if you look at the lengths that are employed in mounting computers etc in military vehicles, it can be quite expensive - even if you aren't mounting for survivability after an explosion!

    So...

    There are two types of movement that can affect your hard drive. The first is low amplitude high frequency movement - commonly known as vibration. Usually the concern is to prevent vibration from a hard drive getting to the a chassis and generating noise, and this is where the elastic band/rubber grommet type of mounting arrangement is used - and of course that will work in reverse. However that is unlikely to be the main problem.

    The problem you really need to guard against is the high amplitude step type of input (to use an electrical analagy) and the aim of the shock mounting is to reduce the peak acceleration caused by that shock caused (say) by driving over a pot hole. To do that you need to look at a spring/mass/damper system - like a car suspension. The mass is the mass of the hard drive, the spring then absorbs the energy of the initial shoch by storing it, and then the stored energy is dissipated by the damper. So any form of damping system has to be matched to the mass of the item being protected and the peak acceleration it can withstand. You also need to consider the peak excursion that the spring mass damper system can be permitted to make.

    So much for the theory considerations.

    Your car suspension will absorb a lot of the shocks from the road surface, unless it is so great that the suspension bottoms out and transfers the energy directly to the cars body.

    Now think about the hard drive. Yoiur concern is really about head crashes. The head itself is very light (low mass) compared with the mass of the drive chassis so that will also mitigate against shock effects. A laptop drive may be more robust at rest, when the heads are parked, but your concern is while it is operational. A 2.5" drive chassis will have a lower mass and therefore inertia than a 3.5" drive which is probably a good thing.

    So - bottom line... if you really were going to be doing this in a demanding environment, you would now be looking to reduce the mass of the system, and designing a spring/damper system to limit the peak acceleration to the devices under the maximum anticipated shock and the maximum cleaence around the equipment, and you would be doing considerable computer modelling to ensure your S/M/D system performed as you expected.

    But you aren't - so.. lloking at these factors, I'd be tempted to use a 2.5" drive firmly fixed in the computer case and possibly using some form of shock mount for the case. Shock mounts aren't cheap though. RS do a range (actually sold as vibration mounts - but vibration and shock are similar) And I assume that this is going to be used in a standard road vehicle on paved surfaces.

    Or you could do as others have said and get a 2.5" drive and be prepared for it to fail by taking frequent backups - or use an SSD.

    You haven't said what this is going to be used for - my guess is some form of in car video system so the content of the HDD isn't going to be irreplaceable.

    Just for info...

    http://uk.rs-online.com/web/search/s...s%20and%20Feet
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    Does he need a reason? Funkstar's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    Without getting to deep into it (nice post though Peter ) I would also suggest a 2.5" drive instead of a regular desktop one.

    Or perhaps two in RAID-1 for if one dies you still have availability until you can replace it. Will manufacturers still warranty drives used in this situation?

    But as long as you have a backup of the OS and this isn't your main store of media (i doubt it would be) then do you really care if the drive fails? as long as it lasts long enough that you aren't constantly swapping it out.

    What software are you using? is it specific CarPC software? I would hope that any specific software for this situation would be pretty cache heavy and only use the drive sparingly then park the heads to help prevent damage. If it's all software you have assembled yourself it might be worth looking into whether you can set it up to act like this as well.

    Unless you are going to chuck hundreds and hundreds at it, I would say SSDs are just a bit OTT at the moment.

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    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    Andehh, I have some old silent drive style enclosures, they might help? You can have em for postage.
    throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)

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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Re: Hard drive in a shaky environment?

    How about using a card reader and read your media off that - then once your music app is cached the main hard drive might be able to spin down the main activity will be reading off your SD card or whatever, which is basically a very cheap SSD.

    edit: or just a USB pen drive.. doh!

    I wonder if you could find a way of installing the OS, or most of it, on the pen drive too?

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