Mounting a Hard Disk Upside Down

Is there any reason why a Hard Drive should not be mounted upside down (label side facing down)? I have 2 WD 74GB Raptors if that matters. Thanks in advance.

Depends on the drive. The manufacturer's spec sheet for the drive should indicate permissible mounting orientations.

Of course - they're all on the manufacturer's web site these days. I haven't seen any restrictions on upside down in a long while, but then again, I haven't been looking.

You mind letting me know what would be bad about mounting a drive upside down? Are you talking about a gravity held read/write arm? I guess that would do it, but cant think of anything else.

I gotta admit that made me chuckle.

No it's a much simpler reason, really. And I admit I'm thinking ahead a little. My new case (Silverstone TJ07) does not leave much clearance between the side of the case and the back of the HDD when mounted in the removable cages. I just ordered some right angle SATA cables to help with that but I am thinking that with the orientation of the way the SATA cable plugs into the back of the drive, the cable will be going down. My SATA connectors on my mobo (A8N-SLI Deluxe) are above that position.

Being an obsessive neat freak, I was hoping to not have to run the cable down from the drive and then curl it back upwards to the mobo. I figured if the HDD was mounted upside down then the plug would go up making for a little bit neater cable run to the mobo.

Sorry my reason for wanting to know this wasn't quite as glamorous as taking my PC into space or bunjie jumping.

Regardless, thanks for the responses. I'll check my HDD manual once I get home from work.

The real trick would be if you were to pick up some of those 32 gig solid state drives that I believe Samsung is getting ready to release... because then you could mount them in a spinning gyroscopic case and have no worries whatsoever!

Or maybe not... but it would be neat at LAN parties.

Crap, my 2yr old has thown HDs on the floor, sucked on them, and shoved USB connectors onto the SATA port...and they still worked. But I DO NOT recommend this. My attention was diverted during these times.

My kid did burn out my onboard FireWire once when he stuck the power adapter connector for my camcorder into the from FireWire port on my computer though.

Off topic, but I vote you can stick HDs any ol way. I personally believe vertical is better than horizontal - because with horizontal you have gravity trying to pull the arm into the disk. And if things get a tad worn out that clearance deteriates over time with friction, then gravity might play a part.

But it's a baseless theory.

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This shouldn't be a problem, I've been running four drives upside down due to similar problems with cabling for almost three years in an old Fatal1ty AN8 SLI based rig that I still run daily as a second pc. One's an old 160gb Maxtor IDE and the other are sata drives from WD and Hitachi. I simply wanted the power and sata connections on the other side of my drive bays to make cabling less congested and easier to get access to. Never had a problem at all although I once had the 500gb WD on it's side and it disappeared from time to time until it went upright again. The others coped with that just fine.

It does depend almost entirely on your manufacturer; Seagate should do just fine. However, you should remeber that HDD are calibrated and set upwards, so you may have less reliability, as well as slightly decrease the longevity of the drive. If that doesn't concern you, go ahead. But why would you set one up upside down?

If dust is a concern to you, then drive orientation might need to be considered. Make sure you have good HDD ventilation and put the circuit board under the drive, not over. This will keep the dust from going on the circuit board. The top metal part of the HDD is easier to clean than the underside with circuit board.

As far as operational problems, drive orientation shouldn't matter.

I've been wondering several months now, ever since I purchased two Ultra ULT33053 stackable eSATA hard drive enclosures. The design of this enclosure puts the drive inside in an "up-side-down" orientation (label-down, circuit-board-up) when the rubber feet on the enclosure are pointing down and the text labels are right-side-up and readable.

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If I had known this before ordering them, I probably would not have purchased these enclosures. It just doesn't seem right to me. But I decided to give them a try and see how they work out. Since the beginning, I’ve had two concerns. The first is that the ventilation fans on these enclosures are very noisy, but that's a minor thing, I think, except for the little bit of vibration that they cause. My second concern is potentially more serious. Both of the Seagate 2 TB Barracuda drives that I put in these enclosures have made intermittent clicking and knocking sounds for the last six months, ever since they were brand-new. Normally, I would conclude that a drive is on its last leg when they make this kind of noise, but I thought maybe this is just normal for Seagate. I ran CHKDSK, SpinRite, and other tools on these drives and received no errors, so again decided just to wait and see.

Now, after months of enduring frequent unnerving clicking and knocking noises, I have had enough and pretty much decided to replace both hard drives with Western Digital 2 TB “green” drives and both enclosures with an upward-oriented design, even though I have had no loss or corruption of data. I just don’t want to hear the clicking and knocking anymore and don’t want to keep wondering if it’s because of the enclosures. By the way, I have recently tried simply turning the enclosures over so that they are feet-up, with no reduction in the hard drive noise.

Can anyone offer any advice towards my decision or have you had any similar experience that might help me to deal with this? Can anyone recommend a good upward-oriented eSATA hard drive enclosure to replace what I have? Thanks!

Good point. Thanks. I'm sure that they would.

The sound I'm complaining of is not the normal seeking sound that drives make. This noise is more of a "knock" or "thonk" sound, in addition to the seeking noise. It's quite loud. Every other time I've heard this sort of sound, is was accompanied by more serious problems, such as the drive coming and going or not being visible at all in Windows, making the data accessible only via data recovery software or sometimes not at all. I guess, except for the noisy fans, these upside-down enclosures are OK. I do believe I have hard drive problems, though. I'm going to send these back to Seagate before I do lose any data and replace them with Western Digital drives. I've been swearing by WD for more than ten years and only switched to Seagate this time because they were so much cheaper.