First post on these alternative sites so forgive any mistakes. My external hard drive (a small travel one) was enclosed in a padded hard-shell case like this one but I’m still worried. When I went on vacation, I had the hard drive in a bag that I was dragging down the (carpeted) stairs. I don’t know if the protective case was intended to shock absorb something like that and had I realized sooner that the HDD was in the bag, I would’ve packed it away with the laptop instead.
Should I replace the drive before something happens or do those cases shock absorb?
if the drive was gonna fail from a drop, you’d no immediately they’re pretty robust when the heads are parked, if the disk was spinning and the heads were flying that would be a different story
if you test the drive and it read writes fine it’ll be good, just be careful next time
Usually the issues with hard drives come from the heads. If the head is parked and the drive is not spinning, it can handle a bit of abuse before breaking. If the drive is plugged in and spinning then it becomes fairly fragile, even though most drives know to park the head in case of a fall. Also, in any case it’s always better to have a backup of your data, just in case.
I don’t know a ton about hard drive failures, but you could run a SMART check on it to read diagnostic data. It’ll give you a state of health, both impact related and general wear and tear. If that’s clean and the drive read/writes fine, in my experience its fine. As the other comment mentioned they’re far more durable when powered off than running. If travel is a concern, the external hard drive enclosures are generally just a 2.5” HDD with a Sata -> USB adapter. If it’s able to be disassembled, you can replace the hard drive with a solid state drive like this and gain more speed and durability.
