Passing trains causing damage to hard drives?

07
2014-07
  • user1389579

    In my 1.5 years at a fairly small company, I've dealt with 3-4 damaged hard drives (bad blocks mostly). Out of the 4-5 servers and 8 desktops, that's a very large percentage. Many of the drives were not past their lifespan - so the failures were unexpected. I've learned that before my time, there were several catastrophic failures to hard drives as well.

    I've started wondering if this might be due to the local train's vibration. The train is roughly 100ft away from the building and the building does vibrate when it passes. It goes by fairly often - at least every half hour. I've also thought about electrical instability or magnetic interference but the train does seem like a more plausible concern.

    Any ideas?

    • Answers
  • c0dev

    Yes this is possible especially, when the vibrations is strong enough. Imagine a needle on a record player bouncing around if you were trying to drive across town and play an LP at the same time. The same thing is about hard drives so it's possible that the train has caused the problem because of the vibrations.

    As there aren't many good anti-shock-packs for internal harddisks, it will be hard to find a solution for this.

    But many laptop vendors have implemented this technology under different names:

    • HDAPS, Hard Drive Active Protection System, by Lenovo (originally designed by IBM)
    • Sudden Motion Sensor by Apple Inc.
    • GraviSense by Acer
    • 3D DriveGuard, HP Mobile Data Protection System 3D and ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection by HP
    • Free Fall Sensor (FFS) by Dell
    • HDD Protection by Toshiba
  • briankb

    I would recommend performing regular maintenance on your drives. The most effective tool for doing this is Spinrite. By rewriting each sector in a non-destructive low level format, this software can detect damage before it causes you data loss. It relocates your data to healthier sectors on the disk if necessary.


    • Related Question

    My harddrive failed SMART check and short drive self test. What should I do?
  • Pacerier

    I used SeaTools for Windows to test my harddrive and i failed the S.M.A.R.T check and Short Drive Self Test.

    1. What's wrong with my hard drive?

    2. Is it a big problem? Do I need to do anything to solve the problem?

    3. (if I save a file and open it and it wasn't as i have saved it earlier, i would consider that a very big problem indeed)


    • Related Answers
  • techie007

    Back up everything you can from that drive, and then replace it. Short Test errors can sometimes be fixed, but SMART errors are usually permanent (an over-all SMART threshold for some error count has been exceeded).

  • KCotreau

    Based on the information provided, I cannot tell you what is wrong, but you should certainly replace the drive if you care about anything on it. Your drive is predicting failure, so I would consider that a big problem.

    You should also check to see if it is still under warranty. Depending on the drive, a 3-year or 5-year warranty would probably apply directly from Seagate if it is not OEM. Otherwise, you would need to contact the OEM for warranty replacement.