Mount a Hard Drive Vertically?

[Unsickle]

Actually, regarding the rotation. The bearing will be loaded differently.

In the vertical position the bearing will be subjected to a cyclic load as it moves around the axle.

In the horizontal position there is a constant load. The application of this load will move around relatively randomly with respect to the bearing.

At thousands of RPM and after years of service, this might bring up some issues.

 

[FluxCapacitor]

We run 4 servers out of our office (2 Dell, 2 Compaq) and all 4 of them have vertically mounted hard drives. This is the standard method of mounting drives in servers (unless you rack mount your servers) and I've seen this done on disk arrays for mainframes also. I figure if a company is willing to mount 40 4GB drives vertically in an array, it's probably safe for you to do the same.