[Solved] Parking an IDE hard drive for long trip

[jballou]

I am about to bring an array of 20 or so IDE hard drives (mostly Maxtor 250Gb 6Y250P0 models) across a very, very bumpy journey that's going to end halfway across the planet. I want to park the drive heads if possible, I'm not an expert on hard drives but my old WD 40Mb drive in my Tandy 1000 cane with a program called WDPARK that would pull the heads up and away from the platters. I'm looking for the maximum amount of distance between my platters and a head-smashing impact. TIA.
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-Shuttle SN25P, Opteron 185, 74Gb WD Raptor, 2x 300Gb Barracuda 7200.9, 2x 1Gb Corsair dual channel, BFG GeForce 7800GT
-Asus Z7100 laptop, P-M 2.13, 2Gb DDR, 100Gb 7200RPM HDD, 128Mb GeForce 6600 Go.

[timeBandit]

Modern IDE HDs auto-park the heads when power is removed. The mechanism is often a spring-load on the head arm, coupled with a magnetic or mechanical latch. Cutting power de-energizes the voice coil controlling the head arm, removing the electromagnetic force acting against the park spring. The head arm immediately travels to the landing zone (LZ), an area of the disk (usually at the hub) where data is never written. The latch then engages, locking the heads in place over the LZ, where they settle gently onto the platter surface as the platters spin down.

There is no mechanism to lift the heads away from the platters. The heads are lightly spring-loaded to remain in contact with the platter surface when at rest. This is a Good Thing because they're actually safer that way: they can't impact the platter and damage themselves when they're already pressed against it. In operation, the heads are lifted by aerodynamic effects from the rotation of the platters, counteracting the spring-loading and literally "flying" over the surface on a film of air. The drive electronics do not disengage the parking latch until the platters reach this operating speed.

Once parked, the disks should be safe up to the non-operating G-shock limit in the published drive specs. You might want to call or write Maxtor to be dead certain, but I'd be quite surprised if they require any special preparation for transport (other than the best packaging you can afford).
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[jballou]

OK, I was hoping that was the case. Thanks for the explanation.
_________________
-Shuttle SN25P, Opteron 185, 74Gb WD Raptor, 2x 300Gb Barracuda 7200.9, 2x 1Gb Corsair dual channel, BFG GeForce 7800GT
-Asus Z7100 laptop, P-M 2.13, 2Gb DDR, 100Gb 7200RPM HDD, 128Mb GeForce 6600 Go.