I believe that this is still a good practice, especially with larger drives.
If you consider that drives are getting smaller and smaller while holding
more and more, it makes sense that change in position will cause a change in
the ability to read the correct track.  I lost the ability to read the data
on a hard drive once after an upgrade (my first) and after a lot of
research, cussing and swearing I determined that the cause was changing the
relative position of the hard drive just enough to cause it to read
incorrectly.  After reformating, the drive worked flawlessly for a couple of
years.  Scott Mueller in his book Upgrading and repairing PCs talks about
this issue.  He recommends formating the drive in the position is will be
used in, and goes so far as to suggest the the drive be run for 30 minutes
or so to warm up and not allow expansion and contraction to cause problems

This is another of those issues that is probably being corrected as Herbert
stated, but people should be aware of especially with older drives.

Mike Buraczewski
[log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: Herbert Graf <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Friday, April 17, 1998 3:50 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Vertical Desktop


|> -----Original Message-----
|>
|> Back in the days before IDE hard drives, we were told that if you
|> wanted to
|> put a computer case on edge, you should reformat the hard disk in the new
|> position.  This was (in theory) because gravity pulling sideways on the
|> drive mechanism would affect the head alignment.  I don't know if this
was
|> true at the time or if so if it is still true.  Just something else to
|> consider other than air movement.
|
|        That makes sense for older drives that relied on mechanical
mechanisms to
|position the heads, such as stepper motors. However the newer drives use a
|technology resembling a voice coil technology, the head is positioned in a
|closed system, also called self sensing. The older drives were an open
|system, you moved the motor a certain amount of steps and hoped you were in
|the middle of the track. TTYL
|