J
James Sweet
Guest
That may be true for today's hard drives (used in new laptops and
desktop systems), but I was referring to the hard drive in my IBM
Aptiva 595 system which was new eight years ago. Were the read/write
heads on HDs of that vintage designed to retract on power down as
well? If so, I'm sure I was worrying for nothing every time the disk
crashed on that system and my first Windows computer circa 1997 (AST
Adventure! model 200).
The last time I saw a hard drive that needed to be parked was in the mid
1980s, and the largest of that nature I came across was 20MB, yes,
megabytes. I had a PC with a 40MB drive which used a stepper motor head
actuator, but even that had a clever system where the inertia of the
platters generated enough power to step the heads into the park position. In
short, any PC old enough for this to be an issue probably ought to be in a
museum rather than daily use.