Is it bad if my Hard Drive is upside-down?

[sirpado]

I accidentally screwed in my HD upside down in the case, and now the screws like is stripped and itd be a pain to take out. Everything is alright, it is just upside down...All i see on the label is that there is a hole that should not be covered, but nothing about "this side up"...Is my situation bad?

 

[bacillus]

it should be fine so don't stress yourself!

 

[MasterHoss]

Yeah, it should be OK but turn that thing right side up--it looks silly upside down.

 

[Windogg]

You'll be fine, those things can pretty much be mounted in any orientation.

 

[bacillus]

<< it looks silly upside down. >>


he'll probably have to turn his monitor upside down as well to compensate!
only kidding.

 

[Moohooya]

While most drives can be mounted an any direction, I've heard that some have problems when remounted later with a different orientation. Can't say I recall what the issues were, and this was a couple of years ago so I'd guess with advances in HD development it is less of an issue these days.

 

[NelsonMuntz]

It will just fill from the top down now instead of from the bottom up like it's supposed to. J/K

 

[thebestMAX]

I have always seen that the drives can be mounted vertical or horizonzal but not upside down according to manufacturers specs. If yours is working OK, you can take the chance but if a new install I would change it. Really dont need 4 mounting screws at home anyway.

If you stripped all 4, please dont build any more computers or anything else!!

 

[gsaldivar]

I was always taught that the orientation of newer hard drives wasn't really significant.

However, once a drive is formatted and contains data, you should keep the orientation the same.

In other words - if you want to change the orientation of a hard drive, you should reformat the drive in the &quot;new&quot; orientation.

Hope this helps.

 

[HappyPuppy]

I've seen many Gateway mini-towers that have the HDD mounted upside-down to the top of the case framework.

Err-r...that may or may not be a recommendation for mounting the drive like that.

 

[CodeJockey]

It should be fine.

If you're really worried, you can always turn the entire case upside down.

 

[ArchAngel777]

<<< In other words - if you want to change the orientation of a hard drive, you should reformat the drive in the &quot;new&quot; orientation. >>>


Huh? Where the heck did you learn that?

I have a really hard time believing that...... But hey, i've been known to be wrong! But that was only once.... j/k.

 

[bozo1]

<< I have a really hard time believing that >>



And you should. Doing a low-level format was recommended in the early days when reorienting a drive. Early drives, MFM/RLL/ESDI, had to be low-level formatted. This process laid down the tracks on the platter. As the heads 'drifted' with normal use (or reorienting the drive), the data would become harder and harder for the heads to read. Because of this, most manufacturers recommended you do a low-level format once every 12-18 months. This would lay down the tracks at the position where the heads had 'drifted' and the drive could happily read the data again. When SCSI, then IDE came out, drive manufacturers got smarter. They took the entire bottom platter of the drive and laid down positioning tracks. The heads would always sync to these negating the drift factor. Low-level formats were no longer needed at that time, and actually doing it (early drives allowed you to do this), would render the drive unusable. Later on, drive manufacturers got tired of the RMA's and built code into the firmware which disallowed any low-level formats. The drive would receive the command and report back that it did it while only zero-ing out the first track of the drive. Drives got smarter again and now these syncing tracks are built into each platter negating the need to take up the entire bottom platter for this.

Anyway, there is no such thing as a low-level format anymore using the true sense of the term. Any utility that claims to do that does nothing more than wipe data and/or the partition table.

 

[gsaldivar]

Looks like that is outdated info ... I stand corrected.

 

[Davegod75]

i have mine mounted inside out and it works okay

 

[jamarno]

<< I have always seen that the drives can be mounted vertical or horizonzal but not upside down according to manufacturers specs >>


I don't know of any manufacturer disallowing upside-down, but Seagate used to disallow frontside-down because it made the head arm become unbalanced.

Upside-down doesn't hurt a bit and may actually be better because it lets heat flow up and away from the electronics (but when I took chip temperature measurements on a Maxtor, I found no improvement, but vertical mounting cooled the chips 10-20C). Since the bearings are preloaded and the head arms have strong springs that make the heads press against the platters, this is to be expected. Vertical mounting causes a slight change and, as was mentioned, could cause track misalignment with old drives that used a stepper motor instead of a servo &amp; voice coil to position the heads (as all modern drives use), but even this wasn't too bad a problem.