The Fallout Of Backblaze's Bogus HDD Reliability Report

[BoFox]

Of course. After all, crashing into something over and over again on a tiny scale is bound to be more detrimental than having a rubber standoff absorbing the impact. Heck, there's even a couple of drive bay adapters that suspend HDDs using rubber ropes to completely separate the HDDs from the tray around them.

Edit: Here are some handy links:
http://www.lockergnome.com/uncategorized...-by-noise/
http://www.frozencpu.com/cat/l3/g33/c113...Page1.html
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?thr...not.27830/

Edit 2: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/d...ndex3.html

Vibration is every hard drive's enemy, and creates an exponential amount of wear on components. Vibration even has performance implications. A typical desktop HDD experiences a relatively vibration-free existence in a stable environment, and is designed accordingly. One of the major differences in enterprise HDD design is vibration resistance technology. This allows the drive to function well and stand up to the wear and tear of the server chassis and rack.

More HDDs installed in an enclosure raises the amount of vibration. Backblaze packs 45 HDDs per enclosure for maximum storage density. While the drives are initially exposed to vibration from their neighbors inside the server, once placed into the rack, they are exposed to even more vibration from other servers. This creates the 'perfect storm' of vibration, and the use of consumer drives results in horrendous failure rates, as evidenced by the data from Backblaze.

Got it, thanks for the explanation.  Good thing that one of my cases (Antec Lanboy Air) has rubber suspenders: