Position of an external hard drive
 

Today I bought myself a Lacie 250GB External HD. My question is, does the position of the hard drive matter? Does it need to be horizontal, or can it also be used (and not damaged) when positioned vertically?

Man, that's a nice drive. I was going to buy it awhile ago, but I couln't afford it :(. To answer your question, it shouldn't matter how you place it, as my external hardrive has both vertical and horizontal placement options. I can't imagine how it would damage the harddrive in any way. After all, the PS2 can be positioned either way.

You mean one of these?

I've had mine both vertical and horizontal for extended amounts of time, and nothing's happened. I wouldn't worry about it. Plus, there's nothing in the manual that advises against it.

That's the one, yes. You have it too?

Any modern hard drive can be used vertically, horizontally, on its face or upside down. You can even shake them violently during read and writes these days and not cause any damage since head locking and other safety measures virtually protects drives from head crashes.

Position the drive in any orientation you wish, it won't hurt anything.

any position is fine. just keep it off of a carpet or other static prone surface, and keep it away from heat vents and windows. Heat and electrical charges will mess up external hard drives. I have an idiot friend who actually put his drive on his subwoofer and wondered why he had to reformat it.

Yeah, it's pretty awesome. It performs as well as my internal 7200rpm 2Mb cached ATA133 drive. One thing I'll say is even just with it being idle it gets pretty hot !_! though apparently this is nothing to worry about.

How long have you been running it?

So far I have no problems, and even when transferring files it's pretty cold. I just hear an occasional click though.

My external hard drive makes clicks on occasion as well, but I've had for over a year now and haven't run into any problems yet so I think you should be fine as well. However, if the clicking continues for extended periods of time, you could have a serious problem with your hard drive.

It's been about 2 months I'd say now since I last switched it off.

I meant total time since you own it.

Also, do you hear those clicks I mentioned?

Oh sorry ;_;

I got it nearly 6 months ago now, and I've never noticed any clicks from mine.

I know what clicks you're on about, my internal actually does it sometimes, and has since I got it 1year+ ago, but is still fine and is rated 100% fitness by speedfan. I wouldn't worry about it.

This one speaks the truth ... just please don't go shaking your HDs to see if they don't die from it...

I really couldn't say why failing drives make those weird noises so I did a quick search. Heres a site that lets you download 6 wav files from failing drives and tells what each noise meant

http://www.thenetworkadministrator.c...gharddrive.htm