Parking A Hard Disk
| Field | Computer engineering |
| Went Obsolete | When capacity of HDs? exceeded 20 meg |
| Made Obsolete By | Hard disks that parked the head automatically on power loss |
| Knowledge Assumed | Using park.exe under DOS or equivalent for other OS |
| When useful | Never |
In ye olde days, when the first harddisks became available for IBM PC', one needed to execute the park.exe command under DOS when planning to move a computer physically. This caused the hard disk to lower the reading/writing head(s) on an unused part of the platters. If this was not done, the head could hit the platter when the computer case was dropped or otherwise jolted and it could damage your data.
To lock the head on the first hard drive for the Apple II computer, the Corvus 11A, you had to tilt the drive so the head slid back to the park position, then using a screwdriver, turn a screw on the side of the drive 18 turns to move the lock into place which held the heads in place so you could transport the drive. This was back in 1979 when I worked for Corvus Systems.
