Wasn't here a story about Sun (or HP or someone like that) where they moved a bunch of disk servers across a parking lot to another building and found that many of them had died from the vibrations on the trolley cart used to transport them.

it was Yahoo, IIRC.

I had a spinning disk in my car back before we had all these cool embedded PCs. The disk was never an issue, these things can take a lot of abuse (Even New England roads). I had it mounted sideways so a large pothole wouldn't push the heads into the platter.

>a spinning disk in my car

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/record-play...

"The stylus did not jump the grooves even when the car was moving at various speeds over broken pavement, cobblestones, and deep holes."

Reminds me of the video where they yell at hard drives and measure disk latency. https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4

Disks aren't that sensitive to motion.

At my last job, we had 2 airplanes with 5 computers each with 6 disks each mounted in an aircraft. These were regular servers from Dell, not special hardened or resilient hardware or anything. So 60 or so hard disks flying around. Takeoffs, landings, turbulence. Two flights per day, 3 hours each flight, 6 days per week. So 626 landings per year.

Disk failures were not particularly common.

As a counterpoint, I worked for a place that used Mac Minis inside spinning displays and the hard disks absolutely did not like it one bit.

(They also tried spinning disk machines on buses which also failed quickly but that was more the grime and electrical noise than the motion, IIRC. Then they tried mini-servers running from CF and the motion would slowly work the CF cards out of their sockets. The company did not last long.)

Spinning disks can take a surprising amount of shock and vibration before they fail.