Trillan's Journal: Construction?

Anyone know what effect local (very, very local) construction is likely to have on hardware? It feels like the thrumming of a ferry crossing in my office all the time.

Specifically, is there any reason at all to think turning the hardware off will help? I usually leave my PC on so I can work on it from home.

The drive would be rated for that

[djh101010]

I haven't read drive specs in a while but I remember Seagate for instance, showing vibration and impact specs for drives at rest and in use. From a practical standpoint, if you're not seeing read errors, you're fine. I suppose you could track down your drive model and find a spec sheet for it, but my gut tells me it's probably fine. A datacenter, for instance, has hundreds or thousands of drives, in a very mechanically noisy environment.

Re:

[Trillan]

Thanks for the reply. :) I think I won't worry about it. If something fails, it's probably only failing a few weeks ahead of when it otherwise would.

Hmmm.

[SatanicPuppy]

I wouldn't think you'd see issues unless it was a more pronounced vibration...If someone was jackhammering so hard next door that your plants were vibrating off your desk, then you might have problems, but a low hum is probably fine.

If you're really worried about it, you might try sticking a couple of old mouse pads under the computer as a kind of Rube Goldberg shock absorber.

Re:

[Trillan]

We're not quite at the point where plants are vibrating off the desk, but if I have an empty water glass on my desk it does occasionally rattle. I like your idea, though; I'll put something down there.

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[SatanicPuppy]

Huh. Well, what you're worried about is a "head crash", a rattle or bang that causes one of the read/write styli in your hard drive to come into actual contact with the rapidly spinning drive platter itself, which could cause physical damage to one or the other.

Drives are pretty resistant to that sort of damage even when they're going full speed, and most business use won't see a hard drive spinning much at all...Looking at my little green hard drive idiot light, I see an access blink every 30 seconds or so