Safe to Put Rubber Feet on Bare Hard Drives?

Shaina11

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Apr 23, 2014
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I am using two 2TB internal HDDs as external storage drives which I connect to my laptop via USB to SATA adapters, one is the main storage drive, and the other is the backup for the storage drive, and is not used as often, only occasionally to update the contents.

Here's my question. I feel uncomfortable placing the bare hard drives on my wooden desk by themselves, and they seem a little unlevel and wobble a bit on the desk, so for now I have them set atop the adapter boxes, but what I would like to do is potentially get some little rubber adhesive feet to place on the bottom corners of the drives, not touching any part of the PCB of course.

Would this be a bad idea, could it cause issues such as static, or is it perfectly safe, so long as the little rubber pad thingies don't touch the PCB?

Thank you for your time, I appreciate it. :3
 
Solution
hdds vibrate as they operate, its minimal, but they do, you can feel them if you hold them in your hand. its not an extreme wobble.

rubber feet would help mitigate a tiny fraction of this vibration, BUT more importantly: allow air under the bottom of the drive that would normally be sitting on your desk.
- why is this important? hard drives get hot .. typically 45 degrees of hot (thats the same as the average hot shower almost = 50).

dont want to sound like an s&m fan, but: rubber up. rubber dont cause static, but can be used to retain static (you would have to build a device specifically for this).

evidence: recall 15 years ago, petrol pump station bans on mobile phones ... an investigation found out that it was not phones causing...

Shaina11

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Thanks for the response and the suggestion. Aye, I've looked into enclosures, docks and such in the past, but decided against them for various reasons. One of them for enclosures being that most of them cause the hard drives to run hotter than they otherwise would bare, and the docks I wouldn't necessarily trust since I prefer my drives running horizontally rather than vertically, as the motor wouldn't have to fight against gravity as much, basically I just don't want to cause any unnecessary additional wear on the drives.

I've considered enclosures, but the only good ones with a fan that actually is effective are quite up there in price, and the adapters were much cheaper, so I chose that route, just wanting to organize my stuff a bit better, and I'd prefer to not have my drives sitting on rather 'moderate' sized boxes. :p They aren't large per se, and aren't much larger than the drives in dimension, except for the height of the boxes.

Again, thank you for the suggestion, though I still wonder if the previous idea of rubber feet would be safe or not.
 

SoggyTissue

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hdds vibrate as they operate, its minimal, but they do, you can feel them if you hold them in your hand. its not an extreme wobble.

rubber feet would help mitigate a tiny fraction of this vibration, BUT more importantly: allow air under the bottom of the drive that would normally be sitting on your desk.
- why is this important? hard drives get hot .. typically 45 degrees of hot (thats the same as the average hot shower almost = 50).

dont want to sound like an s&m fan, but: rubber up. rubber dont cause static, but can be used to retain static (you would have to build a device specifically for this).

evidence: recall 15 years ago, petrol pump station bans on mobile phones ... an investigation found out that it was not phones causing this, but people in nylon suits (crreating static) and wearing rubber sole shooes/trainers (insulator of static that stops discharge) .. and touching a metal case of the pump results in a spark.
 
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Shaina11

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Ah, thanks for the response Soggy. The specific wobble I was referring to isn't actually caused by the hard drives themselves but rather, how they sit on the desk when I attempted to place them there, it's like the surface is unlevel, thus a corner of the drive could be pushed down, then the other would be up slightly, and hence, wobbling. Of course, I didn't have the hard drives running this way, and never have, since it's a bit of a concern, which is why I opted to use the boxes temporarily since they're stable and steady there.

Aye, one of my HDDs runs at about 40 - 45 C, and the other 44 - 50 C since it's I believe 7200 RPM vs the other being 5400, eventually I may look into a small desk fan to blow over the top of them, and when I eventually get my ceiling fan replaced, that usually helped lower their temperatures a bit. Though I've concerns with such desk fans close to the drives since I've heard that fans' magnetic pulses could potentially cause a problem for hard drives...

So from what I can gather, you don't think putting small rubber bumpers/feet on the bottom of the drives would cause any harm or worry with static? Since you said the rubber could retain static, I got a wee bit curious.

Edit: Just refreshed before I posted this and saw the last updated bit of your post. With that being said... would it then not be a good idea to use the rubber feet if they retain the static, given that the hard drives are metal?
 

SoggyTissue

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your desk is wood, it also insulates/ retains static ... rubber feet would be no different.

it will however mean that you (the person rubbing their nylon trousers together) are able to create static ...and can discharge to the hard drives ... so ground yourself before touching them.

evidence: batteries use a form of rubber as the insulator between the 2 plates (coiled to give batteries their cylinder form) - the plates cannot discharge through the rubber. allowing the battery to hold charge for 5-7 years.
 

Shaina11

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Ah I gotcha, so if I'm understanding correctly, even if I touched them bare on my desk, with or without the feet then, I'm assuming it would have the same effect if I built up any static accidentally, thus I should always touch the desktop tower or something else metal and grounded to discharge any first. I'm also assuming the same goes for them even on the cardboard boxes?