[SATLUG] bad hd?

[Brad Knowles]

On 12/26/07, herb cee wrote:

>  Boggles the mind to think about a RW head being moved at the speed
>  required and still maintain the tiny space required above the surface
>  of a disk spinning so fast just the air currents involved must be
>  an engineering nightmare.

Actually, many hard drives take advantage of something called the 
Bernoulli effect, which helps stabilize the heads a lot more than 
you'd think.  Other hard drives actually have the heads in direct 
contact with the media because they've done other things to virtually 
eliminate friction.  Yet others operate in a near vacuum, so that the 
eliminate most air current issues.

There's all sorts of weirdness going on inside hard drives.  The page 
at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drives> describes some of it, 
but not all.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>