"Luke Scharf" wrote in message
...
Michael 182 wrote:
Why would altitude affect a hard drive?

Because the hard drive head "flies" over the platter. The tolerances are
tight enough and things move quickly enough inside the drive that the air
has a big affect on how close the read/write head gets to the disc
platter, and the drive is designed with this in mind.

Take the air away, and the head that was supposed to be hovering a few
mils over the disc is now scratching up the surface on which the data is
stored. Not a recipe for reliable long-term data storage.

Thanks. Good explanation.



FWIW, I run my iPod at high altitudes all the time with no failures.

Then somebody did a good job designing the hard drive in it, assuming that
it has a hard drive. The iPod Shuffle uses flash ram instead of a hard
drive and should work in a vacuum -- even if listening to music in a
vacuum appears to be impractical. :-)

No, I have the 20 gig drive.

Michael