Posted by Jeff Rife on 11/15/66 11:33

NunYa Bidness (nunyabidness@nunyabidness.org) wrote in alt.video.dvd:
> That's silly. Hard drives are made to be used in any orientation.

Yes, they were, and they were made to be stored in any orientation, but
the reality was that true long-term storage (e.g., 1-3 years) did cause
older drives to have lubricants shift in such a way that startup wasn't
possible without manual intervention (i.e., open the top and spin the
disc...once you did that, the drives worked fine).

In the same way, older drives that had been running for a very long time
would often not restart if you shut them off and allowed them to cool
down to room temperature fairly quickly (like by removing the drive from
the 30-40°C case and placing it in a 20°C room with much better
ventilation than the confined case).

Both cases were caused by the design where the lubricants were distributed
by the rotation of the drive. Newer drives solve these issues, so you
don't hear about the problem as much lately, but it was a severe problem
with older drives (particularly the 5-1/4" models).

--
Jeff Rife |
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