Posted by Bill Vermillion on 12/20/05 20:55

In article <MPG.1df81cc754eabc6598a16f@news.nabs.net>,
Jeff Rife <wevsr@nabs.net> wrote:
>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).

Older drives had specific mounting instructions to ensure cooling.
The Seagate Baraccuda's had tech sheets that specified direction of
air flow, spacing between drives, and which side MUST be up when
mounting horizontally. Those drives like to burn themselves up if
not cooled properly.

>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=B0C case and placing
>it in a 20=B0C room with much better ventilation than the
>confined case).

The lubricants would congeal after many many POH hours so that when
they cooled down the libricants were stiff.

>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).

I pretty much stopped having HD problems in the mid to late 90s,
but drives before then had to be treated carefully and installed
correctly.

And when putting in a new drive in those days you should run them
for about 1/2 hour before formatting so the drive would warm up
correctly and the parts would be in spec. Those were the days of
stepper drive mechanisms so warming up before the initial format
made sure they would work correctly when running.

I'm glad those days are gone forever.


--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

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