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From: huffman@tortuga.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Bill Huffman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: how to lubricate noisy hard drive?
Message-ID: <1991May21.155620.27561@donner.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 21 May 91 15:56:20 GMT
References: <1991May19.063143.2846@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> <1991May20.145859.11814@news.cs.indiana.edu>
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In article <1991May20.145859.11814@news.cs.indiana.edu> bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) writes:
>| >mpd@anomaly.sbs.com (Michael P. Deignan) writes:
>| >>Well, you need to take off the outer casing, and lube the internal
>| >>components. Especially the platters themselves, since you don't want
>| >>the read/write head scraping against the platter.
>| >>>is motor oil fine?
>| >>I find that Quaker State 10W-30 works best.
>
>| gwoho@nntp-server.caltech.edu (g liu) writes:
>| >i tried removing the casing and squirting motor oil on the platters and
>| >other parts...
>| >the problem i have now is that the drive does not seem to work right
>| >anymore...


>All those moving parts are the technology of a past generation anyway.
>What you want is a Solid-State drive!  Fortunately, you can convert
>your drive to solid-state quite cheaply.

>Just mix up about 100 cc's of epoxy (the two-part kind) and apply it
>liberally to the ends of the shaft (runs through that shiny frisbee-
>shaped thing) and the read-write head armature (the hand-like thing that
>grabs at the frisbee disc).  Apply all excess epoxy to anything that
>looks like it might move.  Give it 24 hours to set up, and you'll have
>a solid-state (very) hard disk drive!  Just as solid state as those
>RAM drives, and you don't need any software!


These are all very (interesting?) suggestions.  However, there may be some
novices that might read your suggestions and be lead astray.  I am, of
course, talking about backing up your data first.  Before opening your
computer it is a good idea to make sure that you have fresh backups.
When doing backups you should use compression.  This will squeeze more data
onto your disks, save disk space, and money.  The best way to compress
your data is: find the data line to the drive to receive the compressed
data.  While data is being transferred over the data line,
squeeze it very tightly.  This will make the 1's and 0's smaller thereby
allowing more to fit on your media.  I have found that vise grips work
very well for this.  The larger and tighter the vise grips the better the
compression ratio will be.  This will allow much more data to be stored on
your disks.

Some problems to watch out for are: If you don't seem to be getting an
acceptable compression ratio (1.5 to 2.0), and you are using the largest
vise grips made, then maybe you are squeezing the line horizontally.
Vertical recording seems to work much better.  If your data transfers seem
to be taking longer then, maybe you put a kink in the line.  A kink can
make the electical current flow into an eddy.  This eddy will almost always
slow down the current.  If you run into any other problems then, please let
me know.