[plug] ZIP/JAZ/SPARQ drives

[Terrence Porter]

On Sun, 14 Jun 1998, John Darrington wrote:

> > 
> > One thing that worries me about the internal Zip is dust.  External
> > drives don't have the fan constantly drawing dust in.  The QIC tapes
> > (Colorado/HP) etc tend to die after a few months in dusty offices with 8
> > hours a day running.  Is the door of an internal Zip tight-fitting?
> 
> Dust is a problem with all cheap PC's these days.  Anyone who wnats to run a PC
> with any sort of reliability can expected to get dust in all their drives, clogging
> up any mechanical parts.   
> 
> There is a reltively simple cure.  Take the PSU out.  Pull out the fan, and mount it
> the other way around, so that it's pulling air in rather than pushing it out.  Then
> the inside of the PC has positive pressure instead of negative pressure.  You also
> need to buy a little filter, and a set of replaceable elements, and chnage these on
> a regular basis.
> 
> A few years ago, all equipment was _manuanfactured_ like this.  I wonder whose bright 
> idea it was to mount the fan back to front, and use the drives as filters anyway?  And
> why was the rest of the world dumb enought to follow suit?
> 
> 
> 
Hi pluggers,
           Just thought I'd say , I did this once (reversed the fan in the
psu, added ext filters) and had BIG probs with one of my Quantum hdd's
(280mb). The problems  started in summer, were temperature
related and manifest in bad sectors, slowly increasing over time.
Reversing the fan, cured the problem and that drive is still in use today. 
	Of course YMMV, but its still something to watch, especialy if you
DONT have backups :-(

         terry (the lcd meter guy)
ps I've converted to GVIM, CTAGS and SUDO (for dosemu), and am NOW in
embedded designers heaven! YES its been 8 months, but I've finally broken
the back of VI! YAHOO.