What if You SHAKE a Hard Drive WHILE It's Running?

guys this is gonna be a very fun video because we get to wreck a hard drive in multiple ways and I know that many of you myself included have always probably been very careful when handling a laptop to make sure you don't shake it too much worried about that hard drive getting damaged but you may have wondered I know I have about just how much damage can you really do by shaking the hard drive and how hard would you really have to shake it to completely break it so that's what we're gonna do today and we're gonna kind of take things to the extreme and not only are we just going to shake it by hand the boring way we're gonna actually use a specialized piece of equipment known as a vortex ER normally used in scientific laboratories to mix things and basically just shake the hell out of whatever you put on it and yes of course we're going to strap a hard drive to it oh and yeah obviously while it's running and you can see on this particular vortex so there are three settings for one thousand two thousand and a maximum of three thousand and just for a little bit more fun we're gonna throw in a few surprises towards the end so I think you guys are gonna enjoy this one so why don't we just jump right in oh and of course don't forget to follow me on Instagram I got a shill that's social media so you can follow me on there it's just at Theo Chu so let's take a look and I'll explain the setup pretty quickly I have a laptop and in there I attached a SATA extension cable so I can plug the hard drive directly into the motherboard so the drive is not running off USB or anything it's booting just as if it was inside the computer and this Drive I'm going to be using is a 2.5 inch 7200 rpm Drive so Windows is running and what I'm gonna do is play one of my videos off the drive so if the video stops playing that obviously means the drive is having issues so it should be pretty obvious to see what's going on so to start off we're going to shake it a bit and you can already see just shaking it by hand a tiny bit freezes up the drive so the video stops playing momentarily and I wasn't even shaking it that hard I was actually surprised and of course it does go back right away and start playing again so this doesn't kill the drive obviously but it does freeze it just a bit and I believe what's going on is most modern hard drives I think have some sort of features in there that kind of frees the drive head if enough g-force is applied and that's just a common sense safety feature in there and also we can bring up the resource monitor and use that to kind of look at the drive stats while this is being shook and you can kind of see even though it's a little bit dark what's happening here with the drive activity being green it stops completely when you shake the drive and also in blue that's the action cue and you can see that builds up so basically when the drive is being shook the video stops and then it builds up a queue for actions to take once it's ready to go again and then it continues so clearly there are no major issues here just shaking it by hand and we can go and try the vortex or the fun part so I can strap it down and we'll start off on the low setting of 1000 and right away after it starts the video stops and we can try to navigate Windows doesn't seem to be working completely here so the drive is totally locked up while shaking at least but windows it hasn't crashed completely or anything widows is still running in the RAM and all that and I did click on a few things in the Explorer and after I do stop the shaking and give it a second you'll notice that both the windows I tried to open before open now because it queued up that and then it loads it off the drive once it's ready now we can try it again at 2000 and obviously if it stopped at 1000 its stopping again at 2000 and I was actually able to open a Explorer window here but again it freezes when I try to navigate into another folder and then it loads when I stop it so no surprises there so now at this point let's try the maximum of 3000 and it shook it's so hard here that the cable pretty much fell out right away it wasn't secured enough I tried to plug it back in before windows crashed or anything but it didn't like that I still had to restart the computer and luckily it did actually boot again so we can keep going and do more tests so this time I repositioned it with rubber band to hold the plug in better so I put it back on max after it was booted again and let it go for a little while stopped and started it but I could not get it to kill the drive completely it kept recovering at least for now there's a a bit more we're gonna do in a bit now I did take some super slow-motion footage of the drive shaking and 960 FPS so that's pretty cool to see here and it does really bounce this thing around like crazy I was actually a little bit more surprised about how much bigger this thing had and again you can see the cable fell out this time too and the drive just kind of flew off to the side so this thing is really getting knocked around I put it back on more secured and again it's you can see it's getting knocked up and down in sideways every which way it's not just being spun around this thing's really taking a beating now before we get to some of the really crazy stuff I thought I would do a quick test the same way with an SSD a solid-state drive as so I hooked that up the same way started playing a video and you can see it does not actually stop that video at all it keeps continuously reading off the drive because SSDs have no moving parts so it doesn't care about being shook and if you look at the resource monitor you'd see that the green activity graph doesn't stop at all even on the high speeds of being shaken it doesn't stop at all at this point I really wanted to kill the hard drive so I put it on while unplugged for a bit and just kind of let it run for a minute and then I put it on its side and did plug it in so kind of a different angle thinking maybe that would do it and while it was running but again even doing that the drive still would not dies these things can actually take quite a bit of a beating apparently I mean I thought this thing would be broken pretty quickly but it actually did hold up I was really impressed and I wasn't sure how much more it would take to break it by putting this on a shaker so I figured you know what instead of waiting around let's just see what would happen if we open up the drive while it's running so yes I unscrewed this thing and took off the cover while it was running of course using safety glasses safety first I didn't want the platter shattering in my eyes I actually didn't notice any issues until I finally unscrewed that last Center screw below the label and right away after I did that I started hearing like a high-pitched screeching and only then did the video start to stutter a bit and the noise and stuttering became really really obvious after I took off the cut completely while it was running I guess some air gotten there or maybe it wasn't as secure or something like that now I bet you guys know what's coming next obviously we have to put this thing on the shaker while open while running it is the natural next step right so here is a super slow-motion view of that happening it's open running on the shaker and you'll notice it does stop moving the drive head when it's wobbling so that's kind of what I expected was going on before but at some point you can see the drive head at least once wobble back and forth a bit and maybe even drift a tiny bit more towards the center of the dry so it does seem to be doing something and I also took another one of a super close-up slow-motion and kind of forgive the reflection of the light and there's actually nothing too interesting here I tried to restart and stop the shaking while it was moving pretty quickly so it wouldn't have too much time to stay stopped but even then the drive seemed surprisingly stationary now obviously this drive is not usable anymore it's completely useless and I wondered if it would actually boot after all this and the answer is no it does not boot it just makes a horrible screeching sound and then crashes before windows can even boot and you can actually hear it click a few times if you listen closely the drive head is slapping something in there I don't know if this Drive we killed it basically but it was not necessarily from the shaking it was probably just from opening it up so yeah I think that concludes the experiment if you guys want to keep watching I did some other experiments where I like delete the windows registry and delete system32 I'll put a couple links right here you can just click on those I would love to hear what you guys think I'm looking forward to hearing from you down with comments so I hope to see you guys next time and have a good one

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 489,646

Keywords: technology, tech, shake hard drive, shake hdd, shake hard drive while running, what if you shake a hard drive, hard disk drive, hard drive, experiment, what if, hard drive test, ssd, what if you shake ssd, break hard drive, hard disk, hdd, computer, solid state drive

Id: Z3LQX9V90Vo

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 05 2018