Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-drive grouping of Q&A web sites.

The Question

SuperUser reader Yoosiba wanted to know if hard drive orientation matters:

What change in longevity, if any, does the orientation produce? Let’s dig into the responses to see.

What impact on a hard drive does a vertical position have? Does it affect the life? Is it more prone to errors?

(Not SSDs (solid-state drive), just plain hard drive with all its mechanical parts inside.)

The Answer

Several SuperUser contributors offered their input; Hyperslug writes:

A Dwarf threw out a cooling consideration:

These are statements taken from the hard drive literature at each manufacturer’s website; it’s four years old but things probably haven’t changed much.

Hitachi:

The drive will operate in all axes (6 directions). Performance and error rate will stay within specification limits if the drive is operated in the other orientations from which it was formatted.

Western Digital:

Physical mounting of the drive: WD drives will function normally whether they are mounted sideways or upside down (any X, Y, Z orientation).

Maxtor:

The hard drive can be mounted in any orientation.

Samsung:

As long as it is securely attached to the chassis, hard disk drives may be mounted either horizontally or vertically depending on how your computer’s case is constructed.

When asked if the drive could be mounted at askew angles, their official positions were:

By 90 degrees, they mean vertical, horizontal, or sideways.

Finally, Chris Nava notes that historically there was a precedent for maintaining the orientation the drive was formatted in:

Under situations where cooling is at premium and you don’t have the means to increase cooling of your system, mounting the disk horizontally with the label facing upwards could be seen as an advantage, since heat rises away from the disk surface more efficiently than if the disk was mounted vertically. But even so, any impact on performance or disk lifetime would only be noticeable in years to come. Just thought nevertheless to make this note.

The bottom line: as long as the drive stays safely mounted in the case and properly cooled there is little concern for excessive wear.