In 1989, I did an internship with Imprimis, which was later sold to Seagate.
I worked in the Manufacturing Engineering group, and specifically with the Engineers behind the “Wren” line of hard drives. IIRC, up to the Wren V, they had problems with the lubricant sometimes overheating and leaking out of the spindle onto the platters. When the hard drive spun down, the heads would be glued to the media by the lubricant, thus resulting in stiction.
They developed a “thermalwriter“ test process for the drives to put them through heat conditions way beyond what they might experience in the field, and then developed lubricants that could withstand the heat. They were very proud of this process. But there were still lots of old drives out there.
One of the things the clean room would sometimes do is take hard drives from important clients and try to recover them. I saw a lot of nasty failures, many of which were a result of inappropriate techniques being applied to try to temporarily free the heads.
There was a lot of FUD at the time on what would later be called “The Internet”, so one of my first contributions to the community was to take the knowledge of the engineers at the company and developed a FAQ that I posted to the various USENET newsgroups, on the right — and wrong — ways to try to address this issue in the field.
