The hard drive is not particularly sensitive to vibration -- vibration will destroy any piece of electronics over time, but drives produce their own vibration and hence are "beefed up" a bit. And laptop drives even more.
The real limit with hard drives is peak G force. This isn't vibration so much as "shock" -- a sudden jolt -- and it only takes one such event in excess of the drive's G limit to damage a drive.
A bit of a war story:
Some years back, when I was working on IBM AS/400 computers, they were having trouble in the development lab with drives failing. To permit multiple people to (serially) use a single test system, drives were mounted in sliding plug-in trays, and drives would be exchanged when a test scenario was changed.
But it seems that drives would fail when exchanged this way -- a drive would be good, would be carefully removed and gently set down on a conductive foam pad. But then, an hour later, the drive would be inserted and would be found to be "crashed".
Analysis of the drives showed that they'd been subjected to excessive shock, but originally no one could figure out the source of the shock. Then it was realized that the shock of snapping the drive into the socket (as the tray was slid into the machine) was enough to do this damage.
Of course, these were old "big iron" drives, and current desktop and (especially) laptop drives are much more robust, but still the hazard is mechanical shock that does not seem, to a human, to even be worth noticing, but which to a drive can be devastating, due to the proximity of the shock source to the fragile parts in the drive.
You want to put the laptop drive in the desktop case? – Christopher Chipps – 2013-01-02T03:16:55.617
1yup. Might order a adaptor, but I'm wondering how necessary it is. I'm intending to do a few small tests to answer another question here, and use it long term as a boot drive on an older system. – Journeyman Geek – 2013-01-02T03:21:00.157
Sounds like a good idea. I would use something like this: http://www.itapestore.com/velcrocoins-5815sets-black.aspx instead of the double sided tape.
– Christopher Chipps – 2013-01-02T03:25:59.84712
Hardly scientific evidence, but a good demonstration of how sensitive hard drives can be. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
– Dracs – 2013-01-02T04:36:56.253@Dracs +1 I immediately thought of this video as well. – Thomas – 2013-01-02T06:20:04.943
1@Dracs: Quite the contrary. This is the scientific method. – Marcks Thomas – 2013-01-02T10:01:44.603
I have a Toshiba notebook with a vibration sensor on the hard drive. Fortunately, it only works in Windows (and I use Linux almost exclusively) because it goes off when I look at the notebook the wrong way. I don't shock my notebook on purpose, but normal movements - like putting it on my lap never seem to cause a problem, but they do set the vibration sensor off in Windows. So, yes they are sensitive, but they seem to deal with minor vibrations one way or the other. But, adaptors are really cheap. Why not use one? – Joe – 2013-01-08T06:27:53.593
1Oh, need to order them, but I don't want to wait for them before starting on what I want to test on them. – Journeyman Geek – 2013-01-09T02:01:41.440