Mounting a disk upside down

[xmastree]

I always believed that a hard disk should not be mounted upside down. That is, with the controller pcb on the top. Sideways is ok, but not inverted.

Anyway, my brother in las asked me to take a lok at his computer. He's taken it to two shops and they told him the RAM is faulty, and so is the disk.

The disk is, and always was, inverted.

http://www.lotechdesigns.com/host/thumbs/7254diskdrive.jpg (http://www.lotechdesigns.com/host/images/7254diskdrive.jpg)

You can tell from the warranty sticker that it was built that way. Could that have killed it?

[Cannibal23]

judgeing by the look of the drive its a quantum lm seriese drive. either that or its one of those drives that maxtor just relabeld with their logo after they bought quantum. either way those drives are somewhat prone to failure. have a bunch of them here at work that are no good. i bet it clicks right. anyways. i have seen alot of drives mounted upside down and its usually fine. i think as long as your not banging your pc arround alot it should be ok. alot of those rules about mounting your drive are more geared towards older drives from like the mid 90's and those can be picky. are you trying to build a warranty case with your manufacture for mounting it in a nonstandard way?

[Omega]

Yeah, if you look at some of the really good wire hiding jobs, you will notice that the HD's are up-side down and backwards.

I think that it probably died of a normal reason, because i have held my HD while it was spinning (do NOT do that, there is a rather high risk of shokcing yourself, and probably damaging it) and it was all gyroscopic, and it works fine.

[xmastree]

judgeing by the look of the drive its a quantum lm Almost, it's a 7.5GB fireball

i bet it clicks right.Nope, nothing at all. doesn't even spin up.
are you trying to build a warranty case with your manufacture for mounting it in a nonstandard way?Nah, this is an old unit, Celeron 600, built in 2000. I dont' think they would entertain any warranty now. :rolleyes:
Looking at that mounting, it does seem to be designed to mount a drive that way up, although it makes cabling difficult if the CD is sharing the IDE cable.

[Cannibal23]

i remember the fireball seriese drives. i had a bunch of them. the worst ones of the whole lot was the fireball cx 6.4 had huge problems with just randomly crapping out. if i remember there was acctually a recall on them

[Cevinzol]

if its not even spinning then it might be the controller (pcb) that's shot.

the issue with upside down drives was really an RLL/MFM drive thing. I think it was due to the lubricant oozing out. Old seagate drive were natorious for a symptom called "sticktion" where the bearing grease would gum-up over time due to thermal breakdown. The drives would work but if you ever stopped them. the motor wouldn't have enough omph to wind em up again unless you smacked the drive on a table to break the seal caused by the cacked up grease.

[xmastree]

I thought it was the bearing, which was designed to handle the load in a certain direction, with a spring loaded bearing on top.
Invert it and the weight was on the spring part, rather than the load bearing bearing.

[Omega]

if its not even spinning then it might be the controller (pcb) that's shot.

the issue with upside down drives was really an RLL/MFM drive thing. I think it was due to the lubricant oozing out. Old seagate drive were natorious for a symptom called "sticktion" where the bearing grease would gum-up over time due to thermal breakdown. The drives would work but if you ever stopped them. the motor wouldn't have enough omph to wind em up again unless you smacked the drive on a table to break the seal caused by the cacked up grease.


and smacking hard drives runs the risk of messing up the data on the platters.

[Cevinzol]

and smacking hard drives runs the risk of messing up the data on the platters
Yes it can. Its meant as a last ditch attempt before shelling out tons of green on disk data recovery. Plus this was ONLY for OLD segate drives (20Mb size - yeah way back then, I'm old). The heads were parked, the unit was off and you slapped them flat onto your work bench from about 3 inches in the air. Then you crossed your fingers, powered it up and immedeatly transfered everything to the new drive you had running as a slave. I've only had to do it twice myself but it worked both times.

The drive we're talking about here (quantum fireball) is way newer then those (sorry for the confusion). It does not have a sticktion problem. I was just mentioning it regarding the upside down problem people were concerned about. The fireball was mounted fine. It probably just wore out from age.

Regarding new drives and mounting positions:
Western digital

Secure the hard drive:
WD drives will function normally whether they are mounted sideways or upside down (any X, Y, Z orientation)

Maxtor and samsung don't even mention physical positioning in their FAQ or KB so it must not be an issue.
BTW did you guys know that Seagate bought out maxtor. it seems to be in their FAQ. I must have been under a rock when that happened.

[Cannibal23]

unless you smacked the drive on a table to break the seal caused by the cacked up grease.


i remember my boss takeing the lid off of a mac drive and putting his finger on the ring bracket that holds the platters to the motor and spinning it to kick start the thing. thought he was insane at the time.

[XcOM]

you shouldn't use a HDD upside down, this is because the distance between the platter and the head is less than a hair width, turning it upside down can after time cause the head to colide and damage the platter.