Posts: 1,162
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Joined: Aug 2005
This sounds like dried and hardened grease on the eject mechanism. It's a very common problem with the full-height Sony 3.5" drives. At least yours is a single-sided drive, so there's no risk of head damage from this -- in the double sided models it's possible for the upper head to get caught in the disk when you eject it, and for the head then to be ripped off the gimbal spring.
Anyway, I wrote an article in Datafile (HPCC journal) last year about how to take the (double-head) drive apart and clean it, with a follow-up article a couple of months later on a newer type of eject mechanism that I'd seen. I suspect that, being a single-head drive, you'll have the older type. It's not hard to take it all apart and clean it, but there are a lot of little parts and if you've not done it before you might find the articles of use.
I would think HPCC could sell you back issues of the appropriate issue(s) of Datafile.
-tony