DescentBB

is it bad for a drive to be in use while stored vertically upright? im asking because i have a new SeaGate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA that has gone bad only after 2 1/2 months. yet the two other drives i have in my box arent even flinching a hint of going bad yet after 3 years of near 24/7 power on usage.

SMART is throwing me errors at boot up and SpeedFan is showing me that the Seek Error Rate is at 12 and the warning level is <30

so my point is, upright vertical = bad? or did i just get a bad seed in the apple bunch? if you want a pic ill snap one

If it only made it 2.5 months chances are it's a bad drive and not your fault. That being said, hard drives don't care which orientation they are in ask any I-Pod owner.

Here's some reading http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/21277 ... rientation

yeah im guessing its a bad drive, Seagate says its still under warranty and they even gave me the advanced replacement option, so i get my drive next week on monday or tuesday

Hard drives don't care about orientation at all, if the drive failed because of its orientation it would only be because of heat related issues. But if the drive did have a sufficient airflow over it then it is simply a dud drive. I would avoid powering up that drive till the replacement is available, that way you should be able to copy most if not all of your data off of it.

im not worried about any of the data, its just games that i can re-install easily.


sucks though i gotta do it once again. at least this drive flys through these installations

I've got a separate network drive unit that houses two Seagate drives vertically. Both have been ticking along just fine for over a year.

What HD's don’t like is to be moved while spinning. (gyroscope effect) Except those designed to handle it IE: I-pod.

Spidey wrote:What HD's don’t like is to be moved while spinning. (gyroscope effect) Except those designed to handle it IE: I-pod.

they don't like to be moved due to the potential of sudden jolts. Head crashes in hard drives is like a train running full steam into a schoolhouse.

fliptw wrote:they don't like to be moved due to the potential of sudden jolts. Head crashes in hard drives is like a train running full steam into a schoolhouse.

Its not quite on that 'unstoppable force meets unmovable object" level, but a head crash is bad. The head scrapes along the disk causing damage to the disk surface and the heads themselves. Also it kicks up debris from both that can go on to cause further damage to the drive. The debris and the damage to the heads is what is usually fatal to the drive, because the damaged heads are far more prone to scrape the disk again and the bits of debris can also get in the way causing further damage.