[rescue] Running an ultra 60 on its side

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Dave K <davek08054 at gmail.com>
>Date: 2007/05/30 Wed AM 07:52:14 CDT
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>, Jonathan Groll <lists at groll.co.za>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] Running an ultra 60 on its side

>On 5/30/07, Jonathan Groll <lists at groll.co.za> wrote:
>> Can an ultra 60 be run on its side?
<snip>

>Second is drive positioning.  I haven't seen this documented as much
>on newer drives, and may now not be an issue, but there have been
>disks that only wanted to be mounted in certain orientations.  The
>usual "bad" orientations were with the connector side being on top or
>bottom, and I think I remember some that were fussy about whether the
>PC board side was up or down, but that could be a false memory.

Dave,

There used to be a problem with older drives (say, 10 years ago) that once a drive was formatted while it was, say, horizontal, you could have problems if you later mounted it vertical - the heads/sectors on the platter might be just ever-so-much out of alignment. I've not seen this with newer drives, but this was an issue as I remember back in the sub-Gig IDE HD era.

The issue was the formatting on the drive, you could swap orientations, but to make sure things worked smoothly, it was advisable to reformat the drive in the new orientation. (the drive should be formatted in the orientation it will be installed/operated)

That's what I remember, but I never had a problem with it myself...

Lionel