Thread: How vulnerable is the hard drive in bumpy rides?

i dont protect mine at all... 320gb sata desktop drive. there is constant error-correction going on, and the drives themselves are rated for g forces well beyond any bump youll hit. dont worry about it, at very worst your computer might seem a tad slower because its waiting for the harddrive to recover, but youll never really notice it.

careful about adding protection too. you dont want to overheat your drive and you dont want it loose enough to oscillate, which would end up being worse then just mounting the drive normally in a fixed fashion.

+1

it seems the best solution is no solution at all..

as trader mentioned, some isolation systems can increase vibration on the drive..

Originally Posted by 2009Prius

I am contemplating buying a tablet PC for the car. How vulnerable is the hard drive in bumpy rides? How to protect the hard drive from shocks? Please advise. Thanks!

If its going in a Prius, I'd say don't sweat it. If its going in a rockcrawler or off-road vehicle, that's a whole different environment.

I've run tablets in my cars for a very long time and out of the 10 or so I've had, only one hard drive failed and that one lasted over 4 years. Most tablets have superb shock protection designed into the case. How you mount the case makes little difference to the tablet. I've tried both extremes (soft and bouncy to hard and rigid) and I prefer the rigid mount for passenger safety.

For years I've used various desktop and laptop PCs, mostly in a GMC-3500, which doesn't offer as smooth ride as your 2009 Prius, and I never paid any attention to protecting my hard drives.

It would be nice to be able to afford a nice large SSD drive, though. Perhaps in a year or two the prices will be low enough even for me.

Do your backups regularly.

Originally Posted by 2009Prius

I am contemplating buying a tablet PC for the car. How vulnerable is the hard drive in bumpy rides? How to protect the hard drive from shocks? Please advise. Thanks!

We see this question a lot. Searching at all would yield a laundry list of answers. I have selected a few threads for your reading pleasure

A FAQ:
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/faq-...-computer.html

Media type:
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/gene...f-usb-etc.html

and

Laptop HD vs. Reg one

Mounting:
Hard Drive Mounting

Been covered

Originally Posted by Marvin Hlavac

For years I've used various desktop and laptop PCs, mostly in a GMC-3500, which doesn't offer as smooth ride as your 2009 Prius, and I never paid any attention to protecting my hard drives.

It would be nice to be able to afford a nice large SSD drive, though. Perhaps in a year or two the prices will be low enough even for me.

Do your backups regularly.

I regularly buy the Samsung SLC 64GB SSDs on eBay for $110-$125 for various projects. These are my favorite ones, because since they are SLC, they have the enterprise-grade MTBF rating of 1,200,000 hours, and they came stock in many Dell, Lenovo/IBM, and Apple laptops, and they are basically tried and proven, and inexpensive/reliable, and you wont go broke with these.

I have one of these in each of 6 different computers I own, including my Lenovo Q110 carputer I'm building now. I have 2 more I just got last week so I can install into my HTPC in a RAID 0 array so I get super fast booting.

You see, one must not forget all of the other many advantages of SSDs in addition to shock vibration resistance, because they also draw less power, don't have time delay for spinup, faster reads, and many of them have faster writes, they are dead silent, and are not susceptible to failure when ran at extremely COLD temperatures, etc.

I am only stating these points, because I believe that many people do not realize that the prices for SSD have really dropped a lot lately, and it might be time to do some current price checking since many people might still have it stuck in their minds that SSDs are very expensive. And yes, if you really want the top of the line Intel drive that supports TRIM then yes, those are still spendy, but for a tried and proven SSD like the Samsung SLC line, you can't go wrong.

Examples: http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_trkparm...&_sop=15&_sc=1 (I prefer SLC to MLC for maximum lifespan, but the truth is, MLC will still outlast most cars)

Here's 2 of my favorite Samsung SLC drive model numbers: If you like 2.5" FF: MCCOE64G5MPP-0VA00 and if you prefer 1.8" FF and want to use it w/ a 1.8 to 2.5 SATA adapter: MCCOE64G8MPP-0VAL1
.
.

Samsonite, thanks for the info, much appreciated. I may buy myself one of those SSD drives for Xmas.

Is the upgrade as simple as remove the old HD, and insert the new SSD? Or is there more work involved?

I had a conventional hard drive for almost three years before it finally failed. It was a cheap drive so I cant say whether or not it was due to environmental factors. What I do know, however, is that there was definately a noticable delay in accessing data when traveling on rough roads. I replaced it with two drives: a small ssd for the OS/frontend and a large conventional drive for mp3's. Since then, I havent been able to discern any difference in performance due to road conditions.

Thanks everyone for your help!