Don’t Expose Hard Drives to Heat, Vibration, Warns Seagate’s Engineering Point Man

Consumers who store music or movie content on the hard drive of a network-attached storage box shouldn't sit the device on top of a speaker or put it anywhere near a heat source, warned James Morse, engineering manager for hard-drive vendor Seagate, at a trade seminar Tuesday that storage specialist Synology stages annually in London. “Vibration from the speaker will slow disc performance and can lead to drive failure,” and heat is “as bad for hard drives as vibration,” said Morse. “People forget just how sophisticated hard drives now are,” so much so that “it’s remarkable” they work at all, he told us. Seagate’s new 14-terabyte IronWolf drive has eight discs inside with a read/write head on each side, making a total of 16 heads, he said. These are skimming over the disc surface with a gap of between six and 10 nanometers, Morse said. The casing is filled with helium gas to reduce friction, he said. Any external vibration makes it harder for the disc servo system to align the heads with the very narrow tracks, he said. “Worst case” is when a bit of the disc surface material dislodges and sticks to the head, he said. “The head then scores the surface and the disc fails.” Seagate is the only hard drive vendor with an in-house team able to retrieve data from failed or damaged drives, said Morse. Seagate’s recovery service comes free for two years with the purchase of IronWolf Pro drives, he said.