9114A Drive

[aj04062]

Is it safer to transport a drive with or without a disc in it?

[Raymond Del Tondo]

Hi,

always have a disc put in before attempting to transport the unit. Especially the R/W heads in the Sony drive in the older 9114 (w/o B) tend to stick together, which can lead to tear them off when inserting a disc with somewhat too much force accidently.

Cheers

Ray

[aj04062]

Thanks Ray,

I suspected it was safer to transport with a disc.

Adam

[David Ramsey]

But with no disk in the drive, the heads are apart, separated by a distance of some millimeters (not sure how much, but on those old drives it's a substantial gap). I don't see why it wouldn't be safe to transport the drive without a disk...

[Raymond Del Tondo]

Quote:

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But with no disk in the drive, the heads are apart, separated by a distance of some millimeters

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Theoretically this should be the case, but especially these old Sony drives were problematic, not only in the 9114, but in many devices they were used in. During a certain period of time, HP used these drives in several peripheral devices, like HP-IB disc drives.

Therefore when bought new, these drives were shipped with a yellow pseudo-disc inserted, acting as a spacer, which moved the heads into the "touch surface" position.