I recently bought an inter-tech 4f28 rack mounted case, and while it’s probably not the ideal server case it’s better than most options available to me. One of the things that is a bit concerning about it is the harddrive mounting mechanisms. It seems very similar to how storinators do it, except it’s entirely hardmounted in this case. Which honestly might be fine for enterprise grade drives, but not all my drives are enterprise grade (I have two Toshiba MG drives that are though). So with all that in mind I am looking at modifying the drive caddies to more or less have “floating” mounts. Airflow won’t be an issue as I have a way to make sure that is if anything actually better than the stock setup. The way I want to mount them is to use some foam i have that is of the same kind that is used in pelican cases (the soft foam that you can section off by tearing it in a checkered pattern), so the foam is of decent quality too.
Now to the main discussion of this thread… How significant is the issue of hard-drive vibrations? Is it better to let a harddrive be hardmounted so that it can disipate the vibrations into the case rather than deal with all of them itself? Or is it better to isolate it completely from its surroundings and leave it to only have to deal with its own vibrations?
The discussion on this has been held for decades at this point, and while I will admit that if you only have a single drive and no other vibrations around it then it’s probably better off being mounted to a granite slab (you all probably know what article I’m referring to when I mention granite in this context). Yet the simple fact is that the drives will have to contend with the vibrations of multiple others around it, as well as whatever the fans in the case creates. Not to mention just vibrations from the room itself as well. So given that not all my drives are NAS drives, and even those that are are only rated up to 8 drives in the same enclosure. Would it be best to suspend them on top of foam? Or will hardmounting still be the best case?
Keep in mind that some of these drives are consumer grade “desktop” drives, and this is a personal NAS so I want them to last for multiple decades if that would be possible (not really feasible, but you get my point I suspect).
Still, I’d honestly be interested in hearing what people think about this topic. Should we isolate them from vibrations as much as possible? Or is it best to let it disipate it all to the case, even when that means it will need to deal with every other vibration in the case too?
HDD vibrations are indeed a thing. So, best isolate said HDD to the chassis it’s mounted in. In your case (s’cuse the pun ), modify the drive caddy to allow a rubber grommet to be mounted on the side or bottom of said drive for each of the mounting screws. You can get those rubber grommets fairly cheaply from the likes of ebay, aliexpress, etc. Just make sure they’re the correct dimensions for the screws/bolts you’re gonna use. Which you’ll probably need to source too
Is just a simple rubber grommet enough to properly isolate the drives from each other? Rubber does help a bit, but usually not a ton. Which is why I have been looking into using foam instead to isolate them entirely. This would of course mean that the drives would need to deal with all of their own vibrations though as there would be virtually no way for it to disipate those into the case itself.
By & large, it does. Several manufactures use said rubber grommets in their chassis. Mind, both methods will age (that is, the material ages) but IMO changing rubber grommets is easier then swapping out foam sheets. And rubber takes a long time to degrade to a point it needs replacing, whereas foam may do that rather quickly as its mechanical attributions are not really specified for your use case.
The one thing you’ve probably overlooked is energy consumption. HDD’s use energy, which is mostly converted to heat. So you’ll need to move quite a bit of heat from the drives and foam is not only insulating the vibrations, but also heat from transferring into the surroundings/case. Not good. Actually, really bad. It will cause premature failure of said HDD’s rather rapidly if you neglect cooling them properly.
With vibration in general, you’re more likely to see data corruption (detected and fixed with zfs/btrfs/snapraid scrub) ; than straight out permanent failure.
Rubber “washers” (?!?) can help, if you have 4 pin fans, don’t put them all on the same splitter.
Lots of NAS optimized drives are simply 5400 rpm, and slowing everything down means they use less energy and produce less vibration.
Enterprise (these days basically all high capacity drives are enterprise drives), use new manufacturing tech that can provide lower tolerances on parts produced in order to allow for higher densities, and then there’s some other tricks (more expensive higher frequency, lower efficiency, power delivery / servo electronics), more “servo wedges”, vibration sensors that provide feedback causing drives to skew their own harmonic vibrations by some random delay to not contribute to chassis.
I also specifically mentioned that heat so that won’t be an issue. The way I would mount them would actually give them significantly more airflow than what they would get in a stock configuration. The foam wouldn’t really be an issue to replace given how I would mount it, but I can understand the concern about it degrading. That won’t really happen for quite some time though, especially with the foam I would be using.
My main concern about the rubber grommets is that usually that is designed to be used in desktop cases with relatively few hard-drives in use. So I am concerned that they won’t isolate the drives enough so that they won’t shake themselves to death when there is 27 other drives mounted in the same case… Especially given that these are not all enterprise class drives that are designed with anti vibration mechanisms in place.
In general though this is mostly about making something for scale. Ideally I would only have a bunch of the MG drives, but realistically the other drives will stay around until they are no longer usable anymore. So designing things to make them last even when some of the drives are not designed to be hardmounted along with that many other drives is mostly what I’m after.
So having them all padded with foam, and still well cooled should achieve this best. My main concern is that the rubber won’t isolate them enough to fix the fact that they were just not designed for this usecase, foam on the other side will get me as close to fixing that as I can.
TBH, I wouldn’t bother with any of the vibration padding, the Toshibas can take it, and 4T/2T disks, if they lived this long can probably take it too, and if not… it might be time to get some in-warranty storage.
Eh, I mostly just like using what I have at hand. Though for parity I use Snapraid atm, with one of the 14tb drives set up with that. Snapraid is giving me crap about it though so it’s not entirely in parity atm, but I don’t have the cash for another drive right now so it will have to wait for a bit anyways. Currently I am looking at some 18tb MG drives as that is what would give me the best space for my money right now, though that can change a while down the road.
Sadly it will have to wait for a while, though it’s not a massive loss since the server will be turned off in a week and be off until the end of October. I don’t feel like setting it up with internet access atm, and I am moving away for 6 months so I won’t have direct access to it.
As for the vibration dampening, I know it’s strictly speaking not necessary. I am running this server with low speed fans in a room where I spend actual time though, so just from a noise perspective it would be nice to dampen it a bit more just to get rid of resonance. It might also give some benefit to drive life expectancy as long as I keep decent airflow a priority.
), modify the drive caddy to allow a rubber grommet to be mounted on the side or bottom of said drive for each of the mounting screws. You can get those rubber grommets fairly cheaply from the likes of ebay, aliexpress, etc. Just make sure they’re the correct dimensions for the screws/bolts you’re gonna use. Which you’ll probably need to source too 
