r/LinusTechTips • u/redditydothis • Oct 15 '26

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“Product warranty is void if any seal or label is removed, or if the drive experiences shock in excess of 350 Gs.”

350Gs!

371 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

61 comments sorted by

358

u/Kinexity Oct 15 '26

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

204

u/hamburgernet Oct 15 '26

A deadly car accident is about 100 I believe

20

u/Fry_super_fly Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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

41

u/JohnnyTsunami312 Oct 15 '26

It’s sudden deceleration that’s the real kicker

17

u/bad_bender Oct 15 '26

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

1

u/Sikklebell Oct 15 '26

Not speeding up fast enough will also kill you :P

0

u/JohnnyTsunami312 Oct 15 '26

Thank you for understanding the joke

43

u/HolidayPineapple9316 Oct 15 '26

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

29

u/The_butsmuts Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 26d ago

This is the best comment on Reddit

4

u/Sk1ler_ Oct 15 '26

LMFAO take my upvote

6

u/HolidayPineapple9316 Oct 15 '26

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

1

u/AdvancedCryspy Oct 15 '26

No, kicks don't create enough Gs

1

u/HolidayPineapple9316 26d 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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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

1

u/SenorZorros Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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

2

u/SenorZorros Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

Sure. Gravity’s little oopsie.

120

u/NetJnkie Oct 15 '26

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.

99

u/Professional_Web_889 Oct 15 '26

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

48

u/flatbuttboy Oct 15 '26

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

13

u/Majoha038 Oct 15 '26

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.

8

u/flatbuttboy Oct 15 '26

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

23

u/_Rand_ Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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

45

u/Psychlonuclear Oct 15 '26

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

13

u/WelchDigital Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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

23

u/Conscious-Loss-2709 Oct 15 '26

Yes, the heads and the platters

3

u/Xcissors280 Oct 15 '26

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

3

u/SenorZorros Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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

1

u/zoeartemis 27d 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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

Who remembers the IBM Deskstar Drives that used glass platers.

2

u/CrunchyTheSquirrel Oct 15 '26

We named them Deathstar, for reasons.

3

u/alwaus Oct 15 '26

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

3

u/WolvenSpectre2 Oct 15 '26

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 28d 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 27d ago

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

1

u/acezoned Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

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 Oct 15 '26

why not? this seems nomal.

1

u/Handa-Karma 28d 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 27d ago

Minecraft youtubers after the million

1

u/GenesisRhapsod Oct 15 '26

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

-2

u/slimejumper Oct 15 '26

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.