Just brainstorming here, so let's play: I want to create a box for my file server, something simple, something very tough, and something that can take a hit and keep running. So this means that at any time, the drive may be subject to severe shock. I need a great amount of insulation to this shock, so I was thinking on of Zalman's heatpipe coolers, but attached to something likening to thick foam. I want an ATX motherboard and full size PSU, along with one optical drive. The dimensions should also include room for fans and a good circulation pattern, as this server will not be turned off...ever. Here's my plan, what do you think: heavy metal walls, forming a cube, housing ATX, PSU, HDD, and optical drive. It will be roughly 15"x15" or 40ish CM x 40ish.
make a cavity in the walls and fill it with some sort of foam to help absorb shock. you better make videos of it falling of the top of stuff edit: make sure you secure the HDD and stuff well, more damage will be cause by them bouncing about in foam than from schock-waves
the spray foam that coes in the aresol cans works great i use it in mine but remember to drill holes for heat ventilation. are you going to be playing soccre with this or something
like what u said dark hey lets go play some soccer ....... Oww That Hurt!!! Damnit Visit: www.bit-tech.net -Site pimping edited - Mister_tad
So should the hard drive be firmly mounted? It seems as if the drive will be worse off if firmly mounted to a hard surface... ...or do you mean mounting it to semi-rigid foam? Something that will give a bit but not too much? I think the best way to do it is secure the hard drive in a shock absorber system, with RC car shocks. I've been looking at doing this and I think I can work up a schematic, or at least a drawing, of what it will look like. I'd put the drive in the middle of the cube, hanging from all corners and secured with the shock abosorbers. What do you think?
As long as it can't bounce around too much. if it bounces around little to no physicle damage will be done but the head will move and cause data corruption and it's likely to continue bouncing for a while. if the hard-drive is attached to somthing with a bit of give(perhaps a normal sort of cage lined with rubber) then it hopefully wont be affected too much by the initial vibrations of you kicking it and it won't continue bouncing. It's a trade-off between how much energy it receives and how long that energy stays around. if you stuck it in a lump of cement then it would alot of energy but it would only be around for a second to cause damage. if you suspended it from rubber bands then it wouldn't receive much energy but it would stay around for awhile to cause damage. That's how I see it anyway, don't blame me if somthing goes wrong. edit: the shock absobers might work but I don't know how rigid they are so I can't help
So more rigid, or less rigid? I'm sure I could tighten things down so that the drive wont shudder a nanometer, but will that be better or worse if it falls or is kicked?
You can get a largecase gut it. Then get a smaller case and mount all the computer components inside it, Hange the smaller case from all corners with some springs.
But 15" x 15" x 15" is the size limit. The parts have to all fit within this cube. So rigid mounting or springy mounting to keep the HDD from corrupting data during a fall or sharp shock?
rigid mounting to prevent data loss from the head jumping about, line the drive cage with rubber or somthing to reduce the shock and keep the HDD silent. whatever you make sure it's well ventilated
Here are the sketchup: The fans are 120mm. The 2 hard drives are going to be rigidly mounted to standoffs, and sandwiched between the case wall and the hard drive will be some tempurpedic material. Mounting the hard drive like this (vertical) will keep the drive platters from hitting if it falls straight down, and if it falls sideways, well...we'll just hope for the best. The outside of the box will be made of some kind of wood, probably just MDF or 1" plywood.
I'm not in the most calm of environments, and to boot, I'm in a small room. I need to have something that can take a kick or hit and keep going without me worrying about it. Plus, I'd like to run an experiment: I want to see if a hard drive can survive a 3ft fall while it's running. Probably run a defrag when I push it off. I will have all the parts equally secure, but the hard drives are really the only parts I'm worried about. I won't have any expansion cards to worry about: I'll be using onboard shared video and sound b/c I don't need to worry about gaming performance - it will not be connected to a monitor most of the time.
You're going to need some sort of flexible mount for the drives...mounting them with a stiff mount will transfer all of the shock directly to them. You want something that will absorb the shock. This isn't going to be very practical. I work around military systems that are hardened for field environments and even they don't take to 3ft drops very well - and that's while they are shut down. Running? Forget it. The platter will get scraped by the head if a blow happens while its running.
just get a large steel midi tower case, the cheaper the better. fill the bottom with lead. mount the HD's in the 5 1/2 inch bayes at the top with some bungee cord. put an 80mm fan infront of them, and the CD rom in the bay above. that should take even the sternest of beatings.
I think what he is getting at is he is afraid he is going to bump the computer and make the hard drive slip and grind out. Yeah that sucks and I have had it happen once with an older hard-drive. I like the idea of making a mod that can resist being hit to some degree so here is just an idea going off of someone elses post. I believe they said somthing that absorbes the hit well since Hard drives only run on the 3.5 bay and most bays now or days are removable maybe add two swinging arms on the 3.5 bay so if it gets bumped the hard drive never loses the earths gravity. Hard drives only scratch and mess up from being turned during operation so if I bump it backwards it shouldnt crash because its using the earths magnetics as well as its own to function. Thats just putting it in simple terms its a magnetic device all magnetic devices work in that fashion to some extent. SO if it stays like it was meant to be than no problems should occur. My real solution for this problem, Mod your room a bit and go out and buy some shelfing supplies and make a shelf that sits pretty high. After the shelf is up there surround the shelf with a rail guard to keep it from being pulled off. After that I wouldn't think anything could matter since it cant be hit now.
How about a couple of these? http://www.techdepot.com/product.asp?productid=1987747&affid=10000485 I imagine they'd be pretty resistant to bumps. You'd need some pretty deep pockets though. Bitmicro is working on a 155GB solid-state drive, but I'm will to bet it's going to cost around $200k. /dumb idea The shelf railing isn't bad, but seriously, how long do you go without opening your PC for something? I think I'd be more worried about dropping it when I was taking it down then bumping it during daily activity. And we definitely need to see video of this three foot drop, and then pics of the "no boot device" screen on POST. Good luck man, whatever you decide.
I have been thinking about a similar situation involving a computer harddrive into a car (for a car pc of course ). This past weekend i came up with a really cool idea!. Basically you need two pieces of aluminum/steel/acrylic sheet, and some plain aluminum/steel rod. Not to mention some type of flat rubber product (maybe a cut up timing belt?) Heres a quick 3dsmax render of what the unit would look like (about the same size as a cd-rom but a little wider.
can't you just bolt it to the ceiling, up out of the way. avoiding damage during trauma is much harder than avoiding the trauma in the first place. and if you want to absorb shocks the thing to do is smoothly decelerate any sensitive components - you need to slow things down. use a series of densities of foam.
