[rescue] Moving Sun servers?

[Rick Hamell]

On 4/29/11 6:19 AM, Mr Ian Primus wrote:
> --- On Fri, 4/29/11, vintagecoder at aol.com<vintagecoder at aol.com>  wrote:
>
>> I can't understand how the drives
>> tolerate being
>> anything but level but it's been years since I took a drive
>> apart. Is there
>> anything from Sun or conventional wisdom that says you
>> *shouldn't* run them
>> on their sides or is it just perfectly ok or somewhere in
>> between?
>
> Hard drives don't care which direction they're mounted in. Many computers mount the drives vertical anyway. For example, the Sun A5000 disk array mounts all 14 drives vertically. Most cheap consumer Dell pee-cees mount the hard disk up on end behind the front panel of the computer. Hard drives generally don't like being moved while they're spinning, but they'll happily work in any orientation without damage.

Not entirely true. Some models in some brands have quite specific 
instructions not to mount the drives in certain orientations.

When e-Machines first came out, the Seagate hard drive was mounted with 
the "front" facing down. This caused a large number of failures as the 
bearings were worn down unevenly. Which was really annoying because the 
secondary hard drive bay was mounted correctly, but needed a longer, 
more expensive IDE cable to mount the drive.

Packard Bell had the same issue, the hard drives were mounted upside 
down and took redrilling of screw holes to mount correctly. If I 
remember right, that was some model of Hitachi drives.

I doubt this is a problem with most modern drives, but IDE drives from 
the mid-90's were a bit touchier due to lower quality manufacturing 
processes.

-- 
Rick Hamell

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