The present invention provides passive and active damping systems for reducing or substantially eliminating undesirable vibrations from components of data storage and retrieval systems. The passive and active damping systems incorporate piezoelectric materials, and make use of an advantageous property of these materials, namely the ability to convert mechanical strains into electric potentials and vice versa. The passive systems of the present invention dissipate vibrational energy through an electrical shunt circuit. The active systems seek to cancel an existing vibration in a component by generating and applying an additional vibration to the same component, where the applied vibration is out of phase with the existing vibration and the two vibrations tend to add destructively. Active systems, in certain circumstances, may also be able to anticipate predictable vibrations and proactively cancel them, rather than merely reacting to vibrations after they arise.