Suggestions How to Test No Spin Hard Drives?

I sure am grateful that computing has improved. Funny that such a HDD was the latest & greatest thing at the time.

NT

No fixed disk made since 1980 has had the heads lift off the platter. Certainly, no modern 8", 5", 3" or whatever "Winchester" disk lifts the heads. The heads are SUPER-smooth, and there is a lubricating film on the platters that allows the heads to land on them without damage. (They may have a dedicated landing area with no data written there.)

Jon

My favourite when I worked for Univac was the FastRand (Remington Rand vs Random; geddit?). See

Pity no photo there -

They were amazing beasts; quote: "No UNIVAC programmer who ever encountered a FASTRAND is likely to forget it."

Mike.

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ch

No.

When the HD is powered off, the heads are "parked" outside of the platters.

Bye Jack

scritto:

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Here more pictures (and explanations):

Bye Jack

o:

ch

I read about some laptop HDDs taking the head off-platter during the nought ies to improve shock survival.

NT

"There were reported cases of drum bearing failures that caused the machine to tear itself apart and send the heavy drum crashing through walls."

NT

ing when put in storage).

ill cause the disk from spinning.

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l to no spin testing to date.

Hard drives" but only got "The Drexel mirror site of the Sci.Electronics.Re pair FAQ is temporarily unavailable..."

Grab it by the end by the connectors and smack the SIDE of the drive in the direction to force rotation. You don't want to pull the heads off if they' re only lightly stuck.

Also, sometimes when the bearings are that tight they seize up. This used t o happen to the drum motor on VCRs sometimes.

But then before you smack anything try cold and heat of course. Heatwise it can stand up to maybe 140C or so. That would loosen up the grease and many ovens go that low. And sometimes, for reasons I haven't quite figured out completely, cold works. They can stand being in the freezer.

Once it spins, copy everything worth a shit on it of course. You might only get one chance.

Thanks everyone for all your suggestions.

Forgot to mention that all the HDDs were stored in cool (not freezing) conditions.

Will try some heat tests 1st.

Ken

While in high school (roughly 1970) I did some summer work at the district's Instructional Computer Center, coding some graphics-based teaching software which ran on the district's Philco 102 mainframe. It had huge disk drives, of the sort where the platter assemblies were dropped into the drive-and-heads chassis through an openable lid (no sealed drive assembly).

The story went that one evening, the techs were doing some maintenance on the system, and had one drive's cover opened while the drive was still powered up and spinning. Something happened (allegedly one of the techs was a cigar smoker(!) and a chunk of ash fell off his cigar and was sucked into the drive), something seized up, and the whole platter assembly snapped out of the drive and flew across the room and hit a door frame. Fortunately nobody was in the way and there were no injuries.

I don't know if this _truly_ occurred but it was a good cautionary tale, warning that (1) working on high-power rotating assemblies without safety covers was a bad idea, and (2) smoking tobacco could be bad for your health.

I have no reason to believe that this incident was the inspiration behind the movie "Master of the Flying Guillotine"... damn it. It really should have been.

Or of the Bond movie's OddJob?

Mike.