Topic awaiting preservation: Question about hard drive damage

Ok, my dad has a laptop, and he usually uses it on the dinner table in the living room. so hes like super picky about people bumping the table cause hes afraid the hard drive will get damaged. he said theres like some spinning disk made of weird fiber crap with a needle that touches it as it spins (like a record player i guess?) and if you bump it the needle could dig into the spinning disk thingy and wreck it.

i prolly totally butchered what he said but i hope some of yall know what im talkin about.

so anyway my question is, what exactly would it take to damage the hard drive? cause like sometimes ill pull a chair out to sit and kinda bump it on the floor or somethin and my dads like "hey easy! dont bump! youll wreck my hd!" will that actually do any damage? what would it take to actually do significant damage? (no, im not planning on messin up his laptop, i wanna prevent it ) cause my dad makes it seem like a tiny bump of the table will mess it up. will it really? or would i be fine like break dancing on the table? (i dont plan on doing that either)

I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out.
-the late rodney dangerfield

well... it sounds as if his hard drive is infact, made of a super neat and cool and smallified record player!!! Amazing, i have heard rumors they exist, but never EVER a first hand account!

But honestly, i think doing some research on hd's in general would be helpful. Maybe you could learn how they work and then camly explain to your father that it is infact a stack of metalic discs spinning around being read and writtin on by a little magnetic thingy that never touches the discs. or... maybe it does... but... um.... no 'needle' is involved.

Now if the harddrive is defective, or goes bad, sometimes the magnetic thingy can come into contact with the discs and wreck havock...

go look em up on the internet.



(Edited by eyezaer on 11-26-2004 05:23)

wikipedia: Hard disk

I've already seen some hard disks fall down of about 1 meter with no damage. But of course they were not in function during their crash on the floor, so the heads were parked in their respective landing areas and did not touch the platters on critical places.

If the movements undergone by a hard disk are laterals, the head(s) shouldn't go up & down and therefore shouldn't damage the platters or themselves. So knocking a chair should be ok, but break dancing on the table is risky.