Hard drive lead on their side.

Hey all, this is probably safe, but my college PC is an eMachines t3065, and I have noticed that the hard drives are lead on their side with IDE adapters pointing towards the case door. Does having them mounted in that particular way slow them down or shorten their life? The inside disks are not flat on the ground, they're vertically upright.

No it's fine. As long as you don't shake them around when they are running they are pretty resilient.

Many prebuilt systems have drive bays facing the side cover as part of their design for easy servicing and adding extra drives. If you drop a case or the drive itself then you will likely have a big problem. One thing about the older Socket A case eMachines put out was that they used Westest Digital drives in them. Those are generally about the most reliable.

For any support or downloads still available the support page for that model is seen at http://www.emachines.com/support/pro...es&model=T3065

I've been using strictly WD drives for a good number of years now and never saw one quit. So you can probably expect the drive there to outlast the system itself.

Excellent, I didn't think it would be a problem, but I just wanted to make sure since I have loads of college work on here which I wouldn't like to loose. I did replace the Hard disk drives however, as my Western Digital drive failed on me, I currently have a 80GB Western Digital IDE drive and a 80GB Excelstor IDE drive in it. I don't plan on dropping my computer, so it is in safe hands.

A smart move for anyone regardless is to backup things on removable media especially if that's a school system and not your own personal system. That way if something goes on the older system there your stuff is still safe and availble for use on another.

WD makes good drives as a rule while I wouldn't prefer an eMachines if I went out to buy a new prebuild. I give HP or Mac a better review. Just remember that frequent backups of anything important is common advice for anyone.

Of course, I have a 20GB external 2.5" drive especially for backups.

That's a smart move! Plus you can take that back and forth for file transfers between systems if you need to. Just odn't drop that one either or... !!!