Does orientation affect hard drive lifespan?

Are there any studies or evidence which show that mounting a hard drive horizontally is better than vertically for the lifespan of the device? Or upside down, or any direction for that matter.

From serverfault Bob

• The quotes in this thread from WD and Seagate suggest not.

  jldugger : I have a hard time trusting vendors at their word. If the FDA didn't regulate medical claims, I'm sure they'd claim their drives prevented cancer if they thought it would help sales. Fortunately, there are groups like Google publishing some 3rd party surveys that give a much clearer picture. Nothing on orientation that I've seen, though.

  Michael Renner : There are reference server designs (mostly 4U+, but with 2.5" disks also 2U) which mount disk drives sideways, so this should be a non-issue. But as you already said, to get meaningful results you'd have to monitor failures in large environments like Amazon S3/EC2, Google or CERN.
  From Adam

• I've never heard of that being a problem.

  With older drives however, I do remember the life of a drive coming to an end if it had been running in one orientation for a prolonged period of time, and then turned. For example a server that had been running for several years, when relocated and rotated into a new position, soon after disks would begin to fail.

  But I haven't seen that with newer drives.

  From Xerxes

• From what I remember back in the day the orientation of a drive when it was formatted was the orientation the drive was suppose to run with. Of course this was well over a decade ago (over 2?). I have not seen any actual test of this, but it's fair to say it doesn't matter anymore.

  I think we can believe the manufacturers with this one.

  Eddie : Yes, this used to be true. Since it's impossible for the consumer to format any modern hard drive (they are formatted at the factory, only), we would have to ask the manufacturer what orientation they use to format. Which I doubt they'd tell us. And yes, modern hard drives still accept a "format" command, but it doesn't mean they lay down a low level format when they process it. They don't.
  From Nate

• Vertical is fine for the life of the drive if you need it. Enterprise class storage arrays often have the drives mounted vertically.

  From a purely mechanical engineer's point of view, drives do have their head positioned in a certain position to the cylinders. If their heads were heavy, and sagging was a problem I'd say that horizontal position would be better. But those masses are neglieable, so it probably doesn't matter even in most idealistic test cases.

  Conclusion: don't worry about it.

  Chris S : Drives read the position of the head from the platter itself. It's not an absolute position like floppy drives used to be.

  monomyth : often? I never heard of a single rack mountable storage device (DAS/SAN/NAS) with horizontal drives.
  From ldigas

• I have fibre channel storage arrays here that mount both vertically (FC) and horizontally (FATA). If the big-boys don't care, then there isn't a fundamental difference.

  The one area where it might come into play is changing the orientation halfway through the drive's life. That might cause a slight misalignment. However, with drive densities where they are these days read heads are doing statistical analysis anyway to figure out which block it is reading, and a slight misalignment is probably 'noise' in that analysis. It may have mattered more back when densities were in the 2GB range, but not when we're throwing around 1TB SATA drives.

  Chris Lively : "That might cause a slight misalignment".. Sorry, but if a slight misalignment was possible it would have a much greater effect on the higher density drives of today than the lower density drives of yesteryear simple due to the precision necessary for smaller track widths.

  Tim Williscroft : Modern drives do servo (closed-loop) alignment of tracks so gravity won't matter. Changing the orientation of a worn BEARING will make a difference: see Brad Gilbert's post.
  From sysadmin1138

• Actually I have found that if you have a hard drive that is starting to make a lot of noise, that if you just tip it to some angle other than 0° or 90° that it will run much quieter.

  So in other words, if you're paranoid, you could tilt every thing by 15° to 75°.

  I personally wouldn't worry about it unless you need to work with older drives.

  From Brad Gilbert

• I have found that, when recovering a failing drive (one that sometimes spins down after power-up, or is excessively noisy, or that recalibrates with a click every second), they can be encouraged to spin up & stay up and running if you do re-orient them.

  Another weird but wonderful trick is to put them in a freezer for a while. When the drive is powered back on it can generally be read for a while until it heats up again. You can extend their "cool" operation by putting one of those "freezer bricks" on top of the drive. Of course you have to watch out for condensation so plastic bags & tea towels are useful too.

  From chr0naut

• Orientation does not affect a drive. Think about iPods with hard drives. They are changing orientation all the time. The most important thing in a drives life is writing to the sectors. Current versions of NTFS do a write leveling (Novell was doing it in the 80's) that will use all the disk surface. Older OS's and file systems under Windows reused portions of the disk when files were erased.

  With write leveling the center of the disk gets used as well as the outsides. This will increase the disk life for multiple reasons that are off this topic.

  Dan

  Electrons_Ahoy : Excellent call with the iPod reference.

  carlito : Drives intended for portable devices are often constructed differently. Perhaps your iPod's drive is not lasting as long as it could.
  From dhperry

• Early PC hard drives such as the ST506 were based on stepper motors. These did not have any feedback mechanism for head vs track position and thus had to be used in the same orientation that they were formatted in. Voice coil harddrives have a feedback loop that allow them to correct for errors such as changes in orientation.

  I would expect that a vertically aligned drive will have to expend a small amount of power to correct for the effect of gravity in a manner that a horizontally aligned drive would not. However since as at least as many disk arrays seems to be vertically oriented as horizontal, I would expect such an effect to be minor.

  Chris S : The magnets in most hard drive's voice coil are setup to pull the heads to the park zone when power is disconnected, so the heads are parked even if shutdown is unexpected. This constant pull makes the force of gravity due to orientation of the drive negligible at worst.
  From jay_dubya

• My company makes systems where a PC is mounted in an industrial control cabinet. In most cases the HD in the PC is in a vertical orientation.

  Since we had some drive failure issues we tried to see if there is a correlation between the orientation and failures. The conclusion, though based on very limited number of cases, was that the orientation had no influence on failures.

  Heat and vibrations are the main causes of the failures probably.

  carlito : The vibrations caused by a rack full of drives all seeking simultaneously can be quite significant with respect to the (perceived) reliability of drives.

  Eddie : Add "power fluctuations" to the list of drive failure causes, unless the computers in question are running on well-filtered power.
  From Dani van der Meer

• You can use a drive horizontally or vertically, it is made to be used that way.

  However, we* found that using a drive at a non-90°C degree (like with an angle of 30°), it wears faster, probably because it puts a bit more strain on the head when moving around.

  *at the data recovery company I was working at

  From Nicolas Charles

• That really depends on the drive design so general rules are difficult. As many people said drives are generally expected to work flat or vertically either way.

  However I seem to remember that some manufacturers advise against running drives upside down. and thinking of how drives are built I can see there might be issues.

  From $pageUsers[$post.author].name