From: kjb@cs.vu.nl (Kees J. Bot) Subject: Re: Conner Crash Date: 27 Dec 1992 18:57:56 GMT
Gary.Pfeffer@f1161.n261.z1.fidonet.org (Gary Pfeffer) writes:
>
>On Christmas Eve my $400.00 Conner decided to die. As a result I lost
>any messages that were sent to me in the last 2 days. Just in case I
>missed some replies, the last 2 concerns I had are as follows:
Out of the five 200Mb Conner disks that were installed in computers that
people at my department bought, three died of stiction(*), including mine.
(Twenty Conner disks of lesser capacity have no problems.)
I turned the computer on and banged the drive back into motion with the
handle of a screwdriver. (I didn't want to go back to the (old) backup,
and the drive was now worthless anyway.)
Now I could make a decent backup.
After this the disk very reliable refused to spin up after two days of
standstill, which was good because it is better if you can show your
vendor a disk that is indeed broken. :-)
(*) "Stiction" is caused by a bad lubricant on the platter surface.
When the power is turned off the heads are pulled back to the parking
cylinder where they sink down to the surface of the platters. When the
power is turned on the lubricant is needed to make the heads slide over
the surface before the airflow lifts them a little bit. Some disks have
a lubricant that is not "oily" enough when the drive is cold: Stiction.