Can vibrations from stacking 2 External HDDs cause damage?

Question

Can vibration from 2 stacked external HDDs cause damage? I have a stick-on HDD sleeve on my laptop with 2 pockets that's able to hold 2 HDDs at once. Would it cause any damage to have 2 HDDs, plugged in and reading/writing, stacked on top of each other in the sleeve?

My concern is that the 2 running HDDs stacked right on top of each other could amplify resonant vibrations that might cause performance issues or even damage over time. After all, I remember news about how the playing the song "Rhythm Nation" could crash old hard drives because the song happen to contain frequencies that matched hdd resonant frequency.

I know the other main issue is heat, and if I try this I'll definitely be monitoring the heat if I try this.

Answer 1

It may not permanently damage a drive, but it could affect performance. Edit: It seems it has no or minimal affect on performance.

I am only addressing the vibration question.

Thought provoking

Even the tiniest of vibrations, for example caused by yelling at the drive may cause failed reads as my colleague demonstrated in this tiktok video:

https://www.tiktok.com/@forensicguy/video/7194473661561113862

After watching this (this isn't some prank video) I assumed vibrations caused by the one stacked drive might affect the performance of the other. After all, a failed read needs to be repeated to get a sector's data, which takes time.

You repeat the experiment using the same free software:

https://www.acelab.eu.com/downloads.php#Disk%20Analyser

Screen caps from video:

Based on this I did a quick preliminary test using the software from the TikTok video which you can find here: https://youtu.be/Zaj83ZYT3Pg, that does seem to suggest vibrations pass from one drive to the other and do have measurable effect.

To cause head movement I used my DiskTuna utility (https://www.disktuna.com/using-disktuna/) to cause head movement by indexing the file system on the other stacked drive.

screenshot:

Note that yellow and pink block indicate delays, not errors and that we're measuring micro seconds and so effect may be unnoticeable otherwise.

Quick practical test using 2 stacked external drives

TL;DR: It appears @Ramhound (see comments) is correct.

• I don't see shocking effects during my small scale test while it seems to me the effect is not absent entirely. And although even if an effect is measurable in all likeliness it will not be noticeable during use.
• In fact, during one test while test subject is under stress from the tandem drive, it even performs marginally better.
• Test subject 2 performs marginally better unstacked under stress than in both stacked tests.

I stacked drives in a similar manner as seen in the question by @Dav.

This test isn't scientific, it's limited and ad hoc.

• Drive models used TOSHIBA TOSHIBA MQ04UBB400 (1) and MQ04UBD200 (2)
• On test subject I ran a quick sequential test using Victoria for Windows.
• To simulate a busy drive and associated vibrations I ran a random seek test on other stacked drive. This random seek test produced audible disk activity (head movement).

Test sequence is

1. Stacked, sequential scan on test subject 1
2. Stacked, sequential scan on test subject 1, random seek on drive 2 (vibrations source)
3. Stacked, sequential scan on test subject 2
4. Stacked, sequential scan on test subject 1, random seek on drive 2 (vibrations source)
5. NON-Stacked, sequential scan on test subject 1, random seek on drive 2 (vibrations source)