PaPaPeng writes:

On Wed, 04 May 2005 04:33:00 GMT, "James Sweet"
wrote:


"Matt" wrote in message
roups.com...
I once used a motor from an old dryer to fix a hard drive.

No, Really!


One of those huge cabinet drives that held about 5mb and had a good sized
induction motor driving the spindle?

My memory is fading since I last serviced those 20MB HDs some 20 years
ago. They weighed at least 100 lbs and took two guys to lift it
because there's no way to put one's arms around one to do any lifting.
It would also have hurt many backbones. The drive's mass was a
design decision to provide inertia to dampen out any outside
vibrations such as someone slamming a door or a heavy guy walking
nearby. Plus that voice coil's seek operations shook the whole drive
like a rat caught by a terrier. The RW head was the size of a stick
of gum and it provided us service guys a good paying job because they
crashed often enough for the computer customer to pay big bucks to be
on a service contract. I think the platters were 14 inch diameter
and when the RW head touched the surface it gouged out a deep groove
into the aluminium.

And don't forget those alignment packs that cost something like $1500
and usually got trashed because someone missed replacing one of the
heads that crashed.

The drives were tough though. Someone gave us a couple of CDC washing
machine type drives but they were several blocks away. So, we wheeled
over city streets just on their casters. Powered right up and wored for
several years without problems.

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