Western Digital's storage enclosures feature a technology the company calls IsoVibe" to reduce the vibration caused by the arrays of spinning hard disks inside.

Vibration is a challenge for spinning media. Despite very servo mechanisms in the drives, external shock and vibration can cause the head to take longer to settle onto the track and can even cause the head to go off track. What this means for the data center is latency and slower performance of applications as the head has to resettle and wait for the correct sector to come around again.

In a dense array of disk drives, adjacent drives that are seeking at high speed can induce vibration into their neighbors. Fans, too, create vibration through the chassis and also through the air as sound energy.

WD's IsoVibe designs includes precise cuts in the baseboard, which act as a suspension for the drives providing isolation from the vibration transmitted from one drive to another. Vibration-isolated fans also minimize vibration and noise transmission. Additionally, vibration-isolated fans reduce the amount of transmitted interference and acoustic vibration.

The company says that says that its IsoVibe technology reduces vibration of individual drives by up to 63% compared to traditional enclosures. The company claims that head positioning total run out (a key measure of how a read/write head stays on track) reduced by 24% compared to a competitor enclosure.