On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 16:34:29 +0000 (UTC), Frank Stutzman
wrote:

How much high altitude flying do you do?

Depends on what is 'high altitude' I usually fly above 5k and below
12k.

I've been told by some folks who ought to know that most consumer level
hard disk drives have a shorter life when used at over 10,000 feet in a
higher vibration environment (i.e. an unpressurized plane).

Interesting, I had not heard this. I have a friend that works in the
HDD industry and is a pilot. I will ask him.

The rational is that the disk heads float on a cushion of air and that at
high density altitude the cushion is much reduced. This causes head
crashes and asorted other problems.

Does this mean that your 10,000 MTBF disk drive gets shortened to 5,000
MTBF? Dunno. How many flight hours do you have on your Fujitsu?

Flight hours on the ST4121 = ~100. Still going strong. Of course,
HDD crashes tend to be 1 time catastrophic events rather than a
degradation over time.

-Nathan