I am currently an engineering student and I would like to perform some vibration testing on different types of HDD's and compare them with different manufacturers. I was wondering if anybody knows any previous studies that other universities have conducted or what type of software would be the best to use in order to determine if the HDD is being damaged or not. I tried using Crystal Disk info but I found out that only a few parameters can be accurately observed.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated

Can you clarify what "to see if HDD is being damaged or not" mean?

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Have you read the Google study?

http://static.googleusercontent.com/ext ... ilures.pdf

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Data Recovery Ireland

I simply mean that when I perform vibration test on the HDD, I would like to know if the disk is being damaged or not. This can either be internal physical damage to the disk or an increase in the reallocated sectors of the HDD. The main idea is to determine at what frequencies and amplitudes that the HDD will suffer damage and at what maximum amplitudes and frequencies that the HDD can be operated at without having these issues.

I am not a mechanics performance engineer, but on a brief thought...

I am not sure that one will realistically be able to get any significant results using damage as reference point, because there are many factors involved with a HDD's damage occurrence, which will more than likely not be consistent with vibration. Additionally, this will likely take a very long time to notice as the damage can take a long time to occur, e.g. months, years.

Lastly, measuring this variable from various manufacturers will be even more difficult as despite major similarities between HDDs, the architectures can vary quite significantly.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

In that case, what would be the best way to proceed in order to do vibration testing?

Sorry, not sure.

Perhaps, maybe you can compare vibration between two same drives (MDL, manufactured same day at the same factory, etc.) where one is somewhat damaged and the other is still healthy.

But then what is considered damaged? And what is the extent of damage? And would the damage location matter?

I think the best is to read on drive manufacturing topics and determine how it can potentially relate to vibration.

I would start with the suggestion link made above.

Edit: Just searched for vibration in the doc above and it says:

"Vibration This is not a parameter that is part of the
SMART set, but it is one that is of general concern in designing drive enclosures as most manufacturers describe
how vibration can affect both performance and reliability of disk drives. Unfortunately we do not have sensor
information to measure this effect directly for drives in
service. We attempted to indirectly infer vibration effects by considering the differences in failure rates between systems with a single drive and those with multiple drives, but those experiments were not controlled
enough for other possible factors to allow us to reach
any conclusions."

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Ok, thanks a lot for your suggestion

I am no engineering guru or even HDD guru. What I am thinking is you havent defined exactly what you mean by vibration testing, or how you are going to perform the test. Are you including IRV? http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/COMP/fcpa/hdd/sata-mobile-ext-duty_wp.pdf

If you are going to use a drive that is unopened, stock or untouched or whatever you want to call it, you will be limited to whatever the drive reports. That could be by SMART or by writing custom software to log the terminal output for example, or even setup cameras and microphones, or other sensors in the drive somehow such as the vibration sensors in HGST drives http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/50D6C79F1E3F024B87256C470074569D/$file/WP_RVS_25March.pdf.
I am thinking maybe if you could control the level of vibration(and again you havent specified what you mean by vibration, the whole drive vibration because of the operation, or the platters vibrating because of speed/unbalanced etc etc) Then you could get measurable results. You would probably need to find a high and low point of the vibration that is in general production drives, and measure close to these values incremenatlly.

Using Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) Control to Minimize Disturbance Effects in Hard Disk Drives :
How are you going to be sure that the act of interrogating the drive looking for errors, and the way you measure looking for errors(scanning read/write tests) is not contributing to errors?

maybe papers like this and the associated references at the end can help:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

this paper:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01071496/c01071496.pdf
has this:

so if you can find out more about where they make this claim from, what research, it might help.

Something I found interesting is a company and their racks with vibration dampening built in:
[url]http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-01-03/for_disks_there_are_no_good_vibrations.html][/url]

good luck with the study, and post back a link afterwards as Im surelots here would be interested to read it

Great, thanks everyone for the input. If I get good test results, I will post them on the forum

Once you start shaking the disk, or subjecting it to vibrations won't the sensor detect this and shut the drive off, also hit the right point and you'll get a head crash and its game over completely.

Good luck.