Does orientation affect hard drive lifespan?

The quotes in this thread from WD and Seagate suggest not.

To precis the link: Seagate, Maxtor and WD drives can be used in any orientation including upside down.

Orientation does not affect a drive. Think about iPods with hard drives. They are changing orientation all the time. The most important thing in a drives life is writing to the sectors. Current versions of NTFS do a write leveling (Novell was doing it in the 80's) that will use all the disk surface. Older OS's and file systems under Windows reused portions of the disk when files were erased.

With write leveling the center of the disk gets used as well as the outsides. This will increase the disk life for multiple reasons that are off this topic.

Dan

I've never heard of that being a problem.

With older drives however, I do remember the life of a drive coming to an end if it had been running in one orientation for a prolonged period of time, and then turned. For example a server that had been running for several years, when relocated and rotated into a new position, soon after disks would begin to fail.

But I haven't seen that with newer drives.

Early PC hard drives such as the ST506 were based on stepper motors. These did not have any feedback mechanism for head vs track position and thus had to be used in the same orientation that they were formatted in. Voice coil harddrives have a feedback loop that allow them to correct for errors such as changes in orientation.

I would expect that a vertically aligned drive will have to expend a small amount of power to correct for the effect of gravity in a manner that a horizontally aligned drive would not. However since as at least as many disk arrays seems to be vertically oriented as horizontal, I would expect such an effect to be minor.

Vertical is fine for the life of the drive if you need it. Enterprise class storage arrays often have the drives mounted vertically.

From a purely mechanical engineer's point of view, drives do have their head positioned in a certain position to the cylinders. If their heads were heavy, and sagging was a problem I'd say that horizontal position would be better. But those masses are neglieable, so it probably doesn't matter even in most idealistic test cases.

Conclusion: don't worry about it.