I am worried that externally caused vibrations might damage my HDDs (NAS in the planning). The subway / metro runs under my building, and every time the train passes, this causes slight but measurable vibrations in the 50-100 Hz frequency range. It is more like a rumbling noise than the usual vibration of a passing train.
I’ve been researching the topic of vibration dampening on and off, and things like sorbothane popped up in my search. I also remember finding foam plates in an eye scorching yellow material.
My plan is to set up the case, fire up a measuring app on my phone (say phybox or the like) and test a few options. But I figured, I can’t be the first person to be guarding against outside vibrations. :D
Other than the usual 3-2-1 and backup regularly, what can I actually do? I would like to make sure that the lifespan of the HDDs doesn’t get too negatively impacted, so the chances of a catastrophic failure, as well as having to invest 1k EUR every couple of years is reduced as much as possible. Thanks!
Thanks for the update and graphs. That is an amazing improvement. In the “after” plot, it looks like any acceleration from the train is well below the noise level of your accelerometer. So, within the limits of your measuring equipment, you’ve effectively eliminated all train vibration. If I were in your place, I would declare success and move on with life! Don’t even bother with foam and rubber feet, because this configuration is working great.
But you could analyze further if you really want; there could be some train signal hiding in all that noise. Since there’s periodic noise in the Z axis, you could take a reading during a still time (computer off, no trains) and see where your spikes are in the frequency domain. Then you could apply a filter (or filters) to cut out that periodic noise.
But unless you’re really into learning about signal analysis, I’d say you could skip it.