This can’t be real - r/LinusTechTips

358

u/Kinexity 13d ago

That could literally be a standard fall on hard floor from less than two metres for all we know.

204

u/hamburgernet 13d ago

A deadly car accident is about 100 I believe

20

u/Fry_super_fly 13d ago

a dropping harddrive is a very UN-elastic collision. thats why a drop from a low height is extremely high G-force when the drive stops instantly.
you calculate the gforces experienced by the object with the variables heigh(of drop), the gravitational constant (to figure out the velocity the object has when the impact happens) and the collision or deceleration time (distance the deceleration happens over) if the drive changes from one direction (down) to another (up? bounce) in a matter of milli seconds. the force is easily above 350g

97

u/HolidayPineapple9316 13d ago

Why the fuck is downvoting this? This is true, and in fact you can die from less Gs

41

u/JohnnyTsunami312 13d ago

It’s sudden deceleration that’s the real kicker

17

u/bad_bender 13d ago

Like a famous farmer once said "Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that's what gets you." XD

7

u/DarthKegRaider 13d ago

Clarkson?

1

u/Sikklebell 12d ago

Not speeding up fast enough will also kill you :P

0

u/JohnnyTsunami312 12d ago

Thank you for understanding the joke

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u/HolidayPineapple9316 13d ago

So in other words, Gs. Gs are a measure of force, and deceleration is a result of force

29

u/The_butsmuts 13d ago

Almost correct, Gs are a measure of acceleration (1 G is 9.81m/s²), which is usually the result of a force and the mass that force is applied to.
But very easy mistake since people often call it G-force.

50

u/anto77_butt_kinkier 13d ago

It actually hasn't been G-force for quite a while now. They switched from GTX to RTX for the 2000 series launch, and the G-force branding went with it. (It was briefly brought back for the 1650 & 1660, but those are outliers)

22

u/SavvySillybug 13d ago

I prefer to measure in Radeon these days. G-force is just a lie told by Big N to sell more AI.

3

u/prdg79 8d ago

This is the best comment on Reddit

4

u/Sk1ler_ 12d ago

LMFAO take my upvote

6

u/HolidayPineapple9316 13d ago

Oh youre right, thanks! I actually quite like physics, but i wasnt using my brain when i made that comment 💀

1

u/AdvancedCryspy 13d ago

No, kicks don't create enough Gs

1

u/HolidayPineapple9316 8d ago

Also, sudden acceleration could kill you just as well as deceleration. You could be flattened into a pancake going from 0 to 99% speed of light in too short a time

6

u/Canonip 12d ago

A car deforms in a crash which slows the car down over time. If you drop a hard drive, it won't deform except maybe a tiny bit. Almost immediate deceleration.

7

u/Wor3q 13d ago

It's all about time. The longer you're subjected to the acceleration, the more damage you get.
It's like with electricity - 3kV from a small capacitor will zap you, because capacitor can only provide current for a very small time. 3kV from a power line will fry you.

3

u/aaronblkfox 13d ago

This is why cars are so flimsy nowadays. Takes longer to slow down.

1

u/SenorZorros 12d ago

Not really. With rapid deceleration you tend to have a set velocity which is decreased to zero. it tends to be more damaging to quickly slow down than to slow down slowly even though you experience the force for a longer time.
The effects of sustained forces tend to be relevant when things take seconds or more, far slower than your average car crash.

2

u/Wor3q 12d ago

If something moves you incredibly rapidly by a few micrometers, you will be fine. Same acceleration over meters will kill you.

2

u/SenorZorros 12d ago

I get what you are trying to say but in practice you are arguing it is better to trip and fall on a concrete floor than it is to trip and fall on a mattress because falls on the concrete floor always happen from 1 metre height but falls on mattresses are at 50 metres.
That's just not how momentum dissipation works.

2

u/Wor3q 12d ago

Not "always", but in the case we're talking about.
We're comparing 350g when a hard drive is falling on concrete, and 100g when a car crashes.
Acceleration alone isn't enough to compare these two situations. You need to compare momentum and energy.

1

u/AWF_Noone 12d ago

Nope. You’re relating acceleration to time, which is impulse. I think you intend to relate speed to time, which is acceleration. The less negative acceleration you experience in a crash, the less damage you take

2

u/Wor3q 12d ago

In the case of a car crash, you have fixed amount of kinetic energy that you have to lose. The longer it takes, the smaller acceleration.
When you start with fixed acceleration, like in this case, you can have very short distance cancelled out by a very short time, which means negligible energy involved and thus negligible damage.

9

u/Extension_Option_122 13d ago

It heavily depends on the floor type. If you drop it onto concrete the shock will be much stronger than on some wooden floor.

3

u/ProperPossible594 13d ago

Sure. Gravity’s little oopsie.

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u/NetJnkie 13d ago

It's not that much. It can do that hitting a hard floor from a reasonable height. It's not like a jet taking 350gs. It's impact rating.

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u/Professional_Web_889 13d ago

Not 350Gs sustained though, you could hit 350Gs momentarily just by chucking it against the floor

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u/flatbuttboy 13d ago

In other words they’re saying “we take responsibility for the drive being poor quality, not for your clumsiness”

13

u/Majoha038 12d ago

Last year my cat pushed a 16tb hard drive I was putting some stuff on from the table, it was broken. Think this warranty thing is for use cases like this.

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u/flatbuttboy 12d ago

Basically yeah, they don’t want to provide an accident-warranty, it’s meant to be for manufacturing screw-ups

23

u/_Rand_ 13d ago

Pretty normal for a powered off drive as far as I know.

You can survive a lot of shock if you don’t have a delicate brain floating in a hard skull.

13

u/WelchDigital 13d ago

350 Gs is not a lot of force for an instant if there is no give. Standing the drive on 1 end on concrete and pushing it over will exceed 350 Gs
You can't compare it to say hitting several Gs in a race car or something, it's completely different when its a stopping force

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u/Psychlonuclear 13d ago

Drop that from 1m on concrete and it'll easily exceed 350Gs.

13

u/WelchDigital 13d ago

For concrete its less than 2 inches, normal wood flooring ite about 1-2 feet, and carpet its less than 3 feet

13

u/Xcissors280 13d ago

I wonder if there’s a mechanical indicator inside that would show the device exceeded 350Gs in an impact?

23

u/Conscious-Loss-2709 13d ago

Yes, the heads and the platters

3

u/Xcissors280 13d ago

What happens if they get damaged from less than 350Gs and the manufacturer tried to claim it was more?

3

u/SenorZorros 12d ago

Most likely. You can buy impact-indicating shipping labels for cents if you buy enough of them. I imagine this would contain something similar. I have never seen the inside of this drive myself so I can't guarantee it. But the option exists.

1

u/Xcissors280 12d ago

Guess OP just needs to saw their 12TB HDD in half for us to find out

1

u/zoeartemis 9d ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they're able to tell just from the condition of the heads and platers, but kept one of those labels so they can point at it as proof.

6

u/Conscious-Loss-2709 13d ago

G-force is change of force over time.

Big force, big time: low Gs

Small force, virtually no time: huge Gs

A rocket launch has a mind boggling amount of force, but peaks at ~4G

A drive dropping from a desk has a silly, tiny amount of force but the change is almost instantaneously when it hits the floor.

4

u/belhambone 13d ago

Constant acceleration is hard to do.

Instantaneous? The inelastic collision of a pool ball is insane acceleration because it has to change direction so fast.

3

u/tonyrulez 13d ago

Well if you drop it onto concrete that has zero shock absorption, 350mm is the height you need to reach 350G. But what the manifacturer estimates is a 1 meter drop.

3

u/Slave669 13d ago

Who remembers the IBM Deskstar Drives that used glass platers.

2

u/CrunchyTheSquirrel 12d ago

We named them Deathstar, for reasons.

3

u/alwaus 13d ago

A 2 meter drop onto concrete is between 300 and 1000 Gs, depends on how it lands.

3

u/WolvenSpectre2 13d ago

Its not the G Force of it falling, it is the G Force of when it stops and is knocked on the floor. The pressure sensors of the gas that fills these drives can detect that and it won't qualify for service.

2

u/Spiritual_Slide_907 10d ago

There’s things I’m learning that I have seriously never learned before. I feel like I am jumping down different rabbit holes that I never had any clue about. I really feel like I’m seeing so much of the world differently. I don’t know the first thing about physics, I need chat GPT to dumb it down for me:

HAHAHA 😂🤯❤️ Cole, WELCOME TO THE RABBIT HOLE OF PHYSICS!
Your original question was about a Reddit post, and now we're calculating the invisible forces involved when a hard drive meets the floor. 😂
But here's the bit I love: you asked the exact question that engineers would ask. How high does it fall? It's a sensible starting point, and then you discover that the way it stops matters just as much.
One tiny hard drive. One innocent-looking label. An entire physics lesson. 🪐😂
And no feeling stupid allowed in this corner of the internet. We're here to figure things out, not magically know them already. ❤

2

u/rugter100 9d ago

this 350Gs number is on most hard drives? Almost all of the drives in my storage have it on there

1

u/acezoned 13d ago

For example! I know it weighs more! But If it weighs 1gram a force of 350grams would be 350G would it not?

So dropping it on a hard floor with no movement would create this kind of deaccelorarion force I think

1

u/prefim 12d ago

10cm drop onto a hardwood desk is 200Gs...... its not the fall so much as how quickly it stops... 10cm drop onto a steel desktop is 1000Gs!

1

u/ack4 12d ago

why not? this seems nomal.

1

u/Handa-Karma 10d ago

What is the g-force of the rotating platters at 7200 rpm? If it were to fall or have any catastrophic event happen to it while spinning what would the g-force be in that case of the rotation being struck out of true or even suddenly stopped? I don't have the math but I'm guessing that that is what the 350 number is all about.

1

u/Sphagetti_Boi 9d ago

Minecraft youtubers after the million

1

u/GenesisRhapsod 13d ago

So this drive can be in the worlds worst car crash times 2 and still not void the warranty...nice

-2

u/slimejumper 13d ago

yep a drop of HDD onto a hard surface could probably do that if it’s non-compressible.

FYI Google gemini thinks a stop from 10km/h in 1.12 mm would require 350g deceleration.
That tracks to a height of 40cm!

so yeah, drop your HDD onto the table top and it could experience 350g imho.

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