On  9 Feb 98 at 9:31, Dan Meeking wrote:

> I remember hearing a while back someone saying something about old
> HDDs sticking?  I think a buddy of mine might be suffering from
> exactly this, assuming of course it happens.  He has an old 340Mb
> in his 486-33 but if you are working, and the HD isn't accessed for
> a while, it takes a second to do anything when you need to use it.
> I'll explain:  you are working in word, there is no paging or other
> disk access happening, when you hit save (or windows decides to eat
> the disk for whatever reason) the drive LED lights up, and you can
> hear the drive making a sound like it's spinning up (but there is
> NO power saving features on this PC whatsoever, so it isn't spun
> down). After about 1 second, you can hear the read-write doohickey
> move and it works as usual.  There are no other problems with this
> drive, no bad sectors, or other oddities, it's just annoying to
> have to wait for the drive to unglue itself every time it is
> accessed because the mouse and everything won't respond while the
> disk doing this!

  If the drive sounds like it's spinning up, it probably is.  Many
drives have the ability to spin themselves down if they're not used
for a while, regardless of whether there is power management
enabled/provided in the BIOS.
  "Stiction" prevents the drive from spinning up; in order for it to
develop, the drive must be stopped (not spinning) for a while.  So
the only way that it could come into this scenario is if, again, the
drive has spun down.

David G


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