Re: Damaged? ProFile Drive Motor

Hello,

well I can't understand Steven's fears:
> NEVER open the sealed portion of a hard disk unless you have the
> proper tools, atire and a Class 1 clean-room to work in! Whether
> or not it kills the drive instantly, you have certainly
> contaminated the internals with a large number of particles that
> can cause permanent damage. If you have any data on there that you
> care about, get it off quickly. I don't want to be the bringer of
> bad tidings, but that drive's days are now surely numbered.

In fact those drives are not completely evacuated (or airless, I don't know the technical english expression). They contain environment air and the most of them even have an air-input and an air-output. The air-in is usually covered internal with a small filter, the output is small hole, with roundabout 1mm diameter. You often can see that from outside the winchester-disk. There is no fan inside because the circulation of the air is run by the spinning winchester disk itself.

By the way the University of Coburg in Germany ran an Apple Mac LC III in their museum for years (maybe they still do) with an opened hard-drive, so that the visitors can see how a computer works. It was Prof. Dr. Thomas Wieland, who had this idea and he told me about that and mailed a link to the server, where you can download some short video-clips and pictures. There you could see the write/read-head of the (I think it was a 40 MB) Hard-Disk in working progress. Perhaps you google that and find some of that in the www. By the way I sold an Apple Lisa 2 and did a donation to that campus-museum in the late 90ies and they received one of my Apple III, but that's another story.

So please be careful, when running an opened winchester disk, but it's not so dramatic as Steven thought.
The older ones of you may probably remember the times in the late 70ies, where huge stacks of disks were mounted manually inte the drive compartment (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_pack) in order to store some dozent Megabyte permantent. This was not done in a Class 1 room, but in the computer room with dusty carpets and cigarette-smoking technicians.
Well, I don't mean, that you should open your winchester-disk in a dessert during a sand-storm, but if you are more or less carefully, that will not be a problem.
The younger ones of you may probably remember the SyQuest Disks. At a time, when the writeable Data-Compact-Disk wasn't in common use there were some other portable data storage technics availlable. Here in Europe it was the company, who sold the "PowerUser" drives, which work like winchester disks, but you could eject the disk and transfer your data (first 20 MB later 44 MB and more) very easy. It was a common way to store data at DTP-companies. Some years later Iomega's ZIP-Drives came up and replaced that technology by a system, that provided more capacity on smaller diks.

So: "it kills the drive instantly" is not really the truth and "contaminated the internals with a large number of particles" leads to the question: What did the black dust, which was located around the graphite spindle do? Did the dust not contaminate the internal? The last sentence "but that drive's days are now surely numbered" has to be a little modified: "but that drive's days are now NOT numbered"

greetings: Tom from Bavaria, the country of the famous Octoberfest, the marvellous castles of Koenig Ludwig and the Alps

-- 
-- 
-----
You received this message because you are a member of the LisaList group.
The group FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/lisa.html
To post to this group, send email to lisalist_at_email.domain.hidden
To leave this group, send email to lisalist+unsubscribe_at_email.domain.hidden
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lisalist
--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LisaList" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lisalist+unsubscribe_at_googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.



text/html attachment: alternate version of message