what HDD's work vertically ( too ) ?

[technotic]

Both orientations are common but what about the third possible orientation, the one with connectors at the top or at the bottom? Is it considered safe for the HDD?


Funny that you say 45 years. In 1980, Shugart started selling a "compact" all-in-one HDD, the first one that resembles today's HDDs. But a year earlier, a hard disk drive was the size of a washing machine, with exchangeable disks assemblies. Probably had to be exactly level to even work.

I'm a little late to this party, but the nostalgia... The very large MFM and RLL drives .. let's not forget how much fun SASI and SCSI drives were back in the 80s.

I believe MFM is whats used for floppy drives and tape storage, while RLL went on to become the standard encoding.

Also I believe original large format HDDs needed to be right side up, with the head on top of the platter, because the head "floated" over the HDD. I'll have to double check that one.

To the guy who is having a bad drive issue, I highly recommend using a write-blocker (these are sata cables that don't allow anything to be written to the drive at all, and doing a full sector by sector imaging of the full drive, all sectors, and be sure to enable the "continue on read error" option with most disk imaging tools. Clonezilla is a good one that you can make a boot USB. Whatever you use, it's best not to have the backup program try reading the file systems. I dealing 'dd' type of reading and writing is going to be best for a forensic image. The only thing that can recover beyond sector-by-sector is using diagnostic machines. One method used by LEAs is a clean room platter transplant. That's where you open the drive, remove the platter, put the platter in another drive, and pray. You need a sealed clean room and extreme care with the platter. But yah, like everyone else said, early onset drive failure. I'd be curious what the extended SMART test data comes back as. A drive damaged physically, even if not spun up at the time, can end up with a very very slight alignment jitter. Gravity is still gravity, and a drive with even the slightest imbalance will most likely have trouble vertically.

 

[Veseleil]

My P300 3TB worked fine vertically.

 

[freeagent]

The last time that I used a vertical drive was in my first computer.. an HP Pavilion with a P3 450 and like a 5GB Bigfoot.. not sure on the size tbh.. but it used to run at 60c no problem..

 

[lexluthermiester]

let's not forget how much fun SASI and SCSI drives were back in the 80s.

Not just the 80's. 90's & 00s as well.

 

[Harlow]

3 years ago i learned that some HDD's dont work vertically , toshiba P300

I had a verically mounted 6TB Toshiba N300 (not P300) in an HP ML350p Gen8 server which developed pending sectors after light use, but outside the 3-year? warranty. The other five 6TB N300 drives were fine. I replaced the ailing drive and re-silvered the TrueNAS Core RAID-Z2 array. I don't attribute the failure to vertical mounting. My second ML350p with 8 vertically mounted SAS drives is fine.

I've had various combinations of three hard disks (assorted types) running on their sides in a Fractal Design case for years and they're fine. I've collected a large pile of failed drives over the years, going back to 20MB ST412 Lapine Titans. Many have been scrapped, but I keep a few for spare boards. Some drives last longer than others, but I expect all of them to die eventually.