On May 3, 23:30, Tony Duell wrote:
> On (almost) all hard disks, the head doesn't drag on the disk - it floats
> on a film of air. Even if the head crashes, the intertia of a stack of
> 14" aluminium platters is considerable, and the most likely result is
> that the head/mounting is ripped off the arm and flung into the HDA
> housing/across the room.
That's what happened to my Seagate, as far as I could see.
>
> > Can any of these stories happen to a modern drive?
>
> Unlikely. The platters are a lot smaller for one thing, so they can
> probably rotate faster without breaking up. And there's likely to be more
> complex speed control of the spindle motor, so it may not be able to
> overspeed significantly.
>
> I'm not worried about my PC drive suddenly spreading bits of platter
> through the front of the case.
No, but the load bang I described was from a 3.5" winnie.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
Received on Sun May 03 1998 - 19:08:24 BST