Sev wrote:I had that happen to my Rio. I had it in my tank bag... I'd done it 100 times before, but on my way home about 30 minutes into a 6 hour highway trip the damn thing just died. Hard drive froze up and it was game over.
God damn do I hate straight lines with no music.
Hard drives are extremely sensitive to vibration.
Inside a hard drive, there are several metal-coated platters that spin at high speed. Above, below, and in between these platters there are tiny magnets that swing in and out, just like the needle on a record player. The difference is that the magnets sit a fraction of a millimeter off the surface of the spinning disk.
Hard drives, especially the small ones used in iPods, have some measure of anti-vibration built in by using rubber mounting, etc. However, any significant shock or vibration - especially prolonged vibration - causes the tiny magnetic heads to occasionally bump into the surface of the disks. This causes scratches, which totally destroys data by removing some of the thin metal surface where it is stored, as well as damages the head and arm. This adds up to very premature hard drive death.
Since they're close-tolerance, high-speed mechanical devices that literally rely on micron-sized groups of particles holding magnetic charges, all hard drives die. It's just a matter of when. So, back up your data, and expect any hard drive subjected to vibration from a motorcycle to die sooner rather than later.