Originally Posted by
ganchan
I know the standard wisdom is to carry delicate electronics on your back when riding, but I'm just getting really tired of sweating under a backpack most months of the year. Lately i've been looking into getting some rear cargo carriers (like the Wald 520) that would allow me to just put the laptop in my backpack and then shove the backpack into one of the baskets. Maybe I'll stuff something soft into the bottom of the backpack for extra cushioning.
My current laptop is just a cheap Chromebook, and very much a second computer, but down the road I might need to transport something a little pricier....
What's your backpack-less solution, if you employ one?
I don't think it's standard wisdom - it sure isn't with me.
There are many possible ways to carry a laptop that has a suspension style system that insulates the laptop from vibration even though that is not a big problem. I have the Arkel Bug that I use and the laptop sleeve that is a neoprene sleeve that suspends the laptop so it's sort of slung in the neoprene. Works great.
I travel a lot internationally. Each of my laptops has been around the world countless times and they are not treated well at all. Turns out, they are pretty reliable. If my laptop can take that, you should have no problems whatsoever.
Originally Posted by
corrado33
Don't most laptops (or rather most well designed laptops) "park" the hard drive heads when they're closed, so they don't get damaged by vibration? I know that was huge a few years ago with "drop protection" where the computer would quickly park the heads if it felt it was falling.
Hard drives do park the heads and many (most) of the 2.5" drives in laptops have accelerometers in them so that if there is a fall, it will park the heads to protect the disk very fast. When you sleep the laptop, the heads park. Yes, you can hurt the drive but it's going to take a lot more than dropping it at that point and it would probably be about the point where you'd do things like break solder connections, connectors etc... Incidentally, to these sort of failure modes, SSDs are not immune. Hard drives are pretty durable things albeit becoming antiques in laptops anyhow.
As always, even if you are not hard on your stuff, you ought to have some sort of backup scheme (Time Machine on Mac is a great tool) so you don't have to worry about it.
Putting an SSD into your laptop is just a good idea from a performance perspective anyhow. And it would be marginally more rugged than a hard drive in normal use.
I sure wouldn't carry a laptop in a backpack. It would be uncomfortable, would screw with the center of gravity while riding and not have an impact on laptop reliability one way or the other over carrying it properly on the bike in a pannier.
J.