What happened to my external hard drive?? - Seriously freaky behaviour
 

External hard drive just stopped working, so i was told to buy one of these usb hard drive docking units where you take apart the external hard drive casing then take out the hard drive and slot it in the usb dock.

It worked perfectly could read all of the data etc. However copied everything over to my other external drive and decided to ccclean the old drive (took 5 hours) and was going to get rid of it.

Turned the dock off and pulled out the drive. Immediately my hand felt all numb and the drive was actually forcing my wrist to rotate so dropped in on the carpet thinking i had just got some kind of shock. The drive was actually spinning around on the carpet and flipped up and was flapping around for quite a few seconds like fish out of water. I ran out of the room.

The force was quite incredible i would have had no chance at holding this thing steady it twisted my wrist pretty badly just holding on to it for second.

The floor is just carpet over wooden floor boards so what was causing this to jump around?

Hand still feels weird, now. What the fuck was that? i know they have magnets inside but surely that does not explain that since it was turned off and the floor is just wooden floor boards??

I don't know but this ..
... made me laugh!

a hard drive is just like a gyro

Did you also smack it with a broom while screaming like a girl?

This was definitely not a longdong moment.

Half the weight of the drive is the platters spinning at 5300 or 7200 RPM. If you try to move it before it spins down there is quite a gyroscopic effect. The harder you try to turn it, the harder it pushes in a direction 90° from the direction you are trying to point it. If you react by jerking your arm to the south, the gyroscopic action converts that into the drive jerking toward the west.

That force is being transmitted through the spindle bearing, so tilting a spinning drive is a good way to ruin it. I did that once. (With 60 TB of drives for Clonebox, I've had the opportunity to see and do a lot of things with drives.)

It's a miracle hard drives work as long as they do, with all of the crazy fast mechanical processes going on in there. That reminds me I need to back up my shit.

I've gotta say if I was you I would attempt to solve any problem by first threatining to hit it with my cock.

.

I knew there would be a logical explanation for it. Thanks :) Had been worried i'd been exposed to some kind of super powerful electromagnetic field or something. The force was freakish - seriously. I know running out of the room may sound a little cowardly but when i dropped it on the carpet and it started flapping around near my bare feet i saw no point hanging around. It looked messed up dancing around on it's own.

fuckin' demons for sure :mad:

Movement in motion :2 cents: Indeed... it would need to be stable for it to run or it would continue to spin worse.

hahahaha.... Thanks, I needed the laugh.

Yes, back up your back ups. :thumbsup

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

If I've learned one thing from the movies, it's this - when freaky shit starts happening, GTFO. That and grab your gun on the way out. :)

gremlins...

Yep , shit WILL happen, so have a plan B (backup) that isn't painful. Especially if the plan B isn't well tested, shit will eventually go wrong with the backup, so have a plan C that is survivable.

We use Clonebox plus a separately made off line backup, for example, because we want to still be around in 20 years, even after some serious bullshit happens. Some BS like the OP throwing one of my drives to the datacenter floor. ;)

I had a contract employee try to change out one of the CPUs in a $4000 Clonebox server without powering it down first. In theory, that server is capable of hot swapping PCI cards, but you don't friggin hotswap a CPU.

:1orglaugh

Man, I literally just LMAO. I needed that today too. I'm sorry for your misfortune with the hard drive, but thank you for giving me a belly laugh!