On Apr 8, 10:30*am, Jim White wrote:
I doubt it Noel. The heads do ride on air but for sterility reasons in a
sealed air capsule which was sealed in a clean room. The most likely
problem is that the air tight capsule which is sealed with a sticky label
will be compromised. This will ultimately lead to contamination and disk
failure. The smallest mite of dust etc will cause a head crash.

Jim

At 08:02 08 April 2009, noel.wade wrote:

Just a quick FYI:

Hard-drive based Camcorders are a bad idea, as most of them are not
qualified for use above 10,000' MSL (thanks to Kempton Izuno for
pointing this out and saving me some $$)... *The problem is the
cushion of air that the hard drive read/write heads float on, above/
beside the platters... as air density goes down these things become
more susceptible to striking the spinning hard drive platters - not a
good thing!

--Noel

Having worked in the HDD industry quite a bit I suspect the
aerodynamics of the head would be an issue if the sealed platters were
exposed to ambient pressure at well above 10,000'. The cold might be
an issue too if you were flying in wave. Dust is an enemy as well as
the heads fly REALLY low over the platter. Then there's shock/
vibration. All are arguments for using a solid state camcorder - no
moving parts aside from an optical zoom if you go that way. I just
ordered a Canon VIXIA HFS10 HD Dual Flash Memory w/32GB Internal
Memory & 10x Optical Zoom. It shoots True HD and is supposed to have
great low light performance, rapid autofocus and lots of other useful
features. You can get really good small, light HD camcorders that
record to SDHC cards these days for very little $.

9B