Many cases allow you to mount drives in vertical or horizontal configurati*** and external drives can be easily repositioned. Does the orientation of the hard drive affect the performance and longevity of the drive?

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问题

超级用户读者Yoosiba想知道硬盘方向是否重要：

I’ve noticed on many **all PC cases that the hard drives are installed vertically. In midi cases, towers and others of a larger housing, they are in the horizontal position.

What impact on a hard drive does a vertical position have? Does it affect the life? Is it more prone to errors?

(Not SSDs (solid-state drive), just plain hard drive with all its mechanical parts inside.)

如果有的话，这种取向会产生什么样的长寿变化？让我们深入研究一下答案。

答案

几个超级用户贡献者提供了他们的输入；Hyperslug写道：

According to several manufacturers, mounting a 3/5″ hard drive horizontally, vertically, or sideways doesn’t affect the hard drive life significantly.

These are statements taken from the hard drive literature at each manufacturer’s website; it’s four years old but things probably haven’t changed much.

Hitachi:

The drive will operate in all axes (6 directi***). Performance and error rate will stay within specification limits if the drive is operated in the other orientati*** from which it was formatted.

Western Digital:

Physical mounting of the drive: WD drives will function normally whether they are mounted sideways or upside down (any X, Y, Z orientation).

Maxtor:

The hard drive can be mounted in any orientation.

Samsung:

As long as it is securely attached to the chassis, hard disk drives may be mounted either horizontally or vertically depending on how your computer’s case is c***tructed.

When asked if the drive could be mounted at askew angles, their official positi*** were:

Manufacturer Contact method Resp***e ------- --------------------- --------------------- WD Tech support, email 90 degrees. Hitachi Hitachi documentation 90 degrees. Samsung Tech support, phone 90 degrees. Fujitsu Tech support, chat 90 degrees +-5. Seagate Tech support, email 90 degrees preferred, but diagonal OK. Maxtor Tech support, phone 90 degrees preferred, but in real world, whatever.

By 90 degrees, they mean vertical, horizontal, or sideways.

一个侏儒抛出了一个冷静的考虑：

It shouldn’t matter which way you do it these days. But there’s one possible caveat of making it vertical:

Under situati*** where cooling is at premium and you don’t have the means to increase cooling of your system, mounting the disk horizontally with the label facing upwards could be seen as an advantage, since heat rises away from the disk surface more efficiently than if the disk was mounted vertically. But even so, any impact on performance or disk lifetime would only be noticeable in years to come. Just thought nevertheless to make this note.

最后，Chris Nava指出，历史上有一个保持驱动器格式化方向的先例：

At one time (long ago) manufactures advised against changing the orientation of a drive without reformatting it. This was due to the heads being affected by gravity and becoming misaligned with respect to the data. I have not seen such a notice in quite some time.

底线：只要驱动器保持安全地安装在机箱中并适当冷却，就不必担心过度磨损。

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