MacIvory disk and monitor information

["Robert W. Kerns" <RWK%fuji.ila.dialnet.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Fri, 17 Mar 89 06:50:14 PDT
    From: gyro@kestrel.arpa (Scott B. Layson)

    Oh, I don't know, people are learning to make disks more physically
    robust anyhow these days because of the spread of portables and
    laptops.  (Which suggests that perhaps you should try to stay within
    the 5 1/4" form factor, since the larger drives will not necessarily
    have had that as a design goal.)

    Mount the drive so the platters are vertical (so bumps won't tend to
    push the head into the disk) and head movement is horizontal (so bumps
    won't tend to move the head off-track), provide a reasonable amount of
    foam cushioning, and I bet you can win.

    'Course I won't accept any liability; I'm just offering an opinion.

    And yes, I used to drive in Boston.

I agree, Scott.  I don't have my manual at hand, but my CMS 300 MByte drive
is rated at some reasonably-large number of g's OPERATING.  At MacWorld a
year ago a CMS employee demonstrated this by picking up the drive WHILE BEING
USED and dropping it on the table.

Mechanically, this drive is the same as the Jasmine 300 MByte drive that Symbolics
uses with the MacIvory.  Although you wouldn't know it from the package that
Jasmine puts it in, this is a 5 1/4 drive; my CMS version is an INTERNAL drive
in my Mac.  I have used this drive on my boat, so I know from experience that
mere motion won't hurt it.  Also, I have dropped a non-operating Mac II on the
floor (with the Quantum 80MByte drive from Apple inside) with no damage.

Disk drives have come a long way in the past few years.  It used to be that if
you sneezed too close to a drive you'd get a head crash, but that really isn't the
case anymore.