..and survived. But will they last for much longer?

I was moving a whole load of stuff in my car, my mate was helping me, I told him "watch the computer case, the hard drives are loose". I go inside the house, come out again and he's holding two hard drives after retrieving them from the driveway. :patrick stewart:

They're currently running, and seeeeem okay. I was trying to watch the last MotoGP race which I'd downloaded, but it had gained an odd stutter every minute or so. I've dropped a hard-drive once in the past, and it didn't last much more than a couple of months before it started playing up, eventually had to get a new HDD.

I'm not overly trusting and suspect I'm up for another two drives, either now, in 4 months time, or whenever something next requires a lot of data and causes trouble.

Any previous experiences with airborne data storage?

I've never dropped any HDD's, but since it's very delicate technology, check if you can loan a external HDD from somebody and back up all the absolutely necessary/personal stuff. That way, IF your harddrives fail, you won't be screwed over that bad...

It's quite a bit worse if the drive is dropped while it's running; a drive that's off has the read/write head "parked" and so it can't crash into the disc when subjected to large accelerations. But it sounds like you should probably back up everything important just in case.

They're probably fine. As kyle mentioned, the read heads were parked so there is no risk of data loss. The physical construction of most drives is pretty solid. They're basically die cast aluminum with a spindle, platters, read heads and a bit of electronics.

If it makes you feel any better, I dropped my LCD from about 4ft. It landed on its corner, it dented the floor. I haven't tested it yet to see if it still works..

New hard drives (particularly in laptops) are coming equipped with free fall detection that's suppose to move the heads to the parked position if it detects that it's falling. I'm going to start making sure all of the new laptops I order for my company have 'em as it seems to be the leading cause of hard drive failure for at least a couple of the employees...

Could just use one of the those old bigfoot drivers.
Like steel bricks.

"airborne data storage"? Is that the whole "cloud" thing?

I always hear advertisements for carbonite.com and it seems to me that they are only $50/yr for unlimited backup. Their site says what folders they back up by default but says you can add any you want, I believe. Seems reasonable to me and I have been thinking about doing it. I have spent a great deal of time converting my DVDs to MP4s and would not like to lose them all.

Or buy a NAS device. At least that way it's on a raid5 and the Terastations are an out of the box ftp and file server. Around $600 for 1TB (678GB usable).

The only problem with that is that if some disaster happens locally, it's as if you never backed anything up at all.

Yeah, I thought about it after I posted and was going to delete but couldn't find the delete button.

It's still a valid option. Speedier backups and you control everything.