gbeer: "He must have been joking, the part about Maxtor's tech specs is total Whoooie!"

Laugh while you can, monkeyboy.

From www.maxtor.com... (Reference # 000927-000000)
"The environment (rack, cabinet, or drawer) for the hard disk drive must provide cooling of the electronics and head/ disk assembly (HDA). Although the hard drive can be mounted in any orientation, when you install the drive, be sure to direct airflow that creates the least amount of airflow resistance, while providing airflow to the electronics and HDA. .."

See Also: http://www.fujitsu-europe.com/home/product.asp?PID=100&INFO=cfg

See Also: From: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/prodspec/dtla_spw.pdf "7.7.5 Drive mounting The drive will operate in all axes (6 directions). Performance and error rate will stay within specification limits if the drive is operated in the other orientations from which it was formatted."

These are not all consistent (Fujitsu does seem to favor my 90 degree Coriolis mounting), but the bottom line would seem to be that edge-wise mounting is OK and (for many) that mounting angle may be irrelevant. I am heartened to see this, if only for the many times that I have seen people take their desktop PC cases and turn them into ersatz mini-towers (I have had many bad spindle dreams!).

OK, OK, so I have an insurmountable aversion to smileys/emoticons. I'll try to do better ;-(

Jim