> Drac "I call mine 'Real Time Clocks'" imas

LOL Dracimas, that's a hilarious way to recycle a hard drive. I wonder about how often you have opportunity to "refurbish" a defunct drive? IMHO, it's probably the mechanical (moving) part of a system that ought to give up the ghost first, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised.

Still, there's an Amazing Hard Drive Trick to keep in mind, which I pulled from a tribology (wear technologies) newsletter:

"The head that reads and writes information to and from a hard disk flies about 50 to 100 nanometers above the disk surface. That's about one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Meanwhile, the disk typically spins beneath the head at about ten to twenty meters per second.
Woody Monroy, head of corporate communications for Seagate Technology, which makes disk drives, says that in terms of speed and clearance, it's equivalent to an F-16 jet fighter plane flying one-sixty second of an inch [less than one millimeter] above the ground, counting blades of grass as it goes, at Mach 813 (or 813 times the speed of sound)."

Wolf "whoohoo, smashin'!" spirit