Somewhat unusual question - Hard Disk "Air bearing"

[monkeysolder]

I hope this is in the right forum -

We are having an unusual problem with a piece of equipment that uses a 2.5" fixed hard disk drive housed in a small, water and airtight sealed enclosure. Prior to sealing, we purge the entire enclosure of air using tetrafluoroethane. (Commonly available in 'canned air' electronics dusting products). This is a common process on our other equipment, but the first time we have done this for a device housing a disk drive. A problem has just emerged where we are seeing a number of failures for the hard drive and I was wondering if this may have to do with the "air bearing" that the read/write head on the disk platter rides on during operation. Could there not be enough gas density (or perhaps too much), which is causing the air bearing to fail?

Thanks,

 

[BigInch]

Cross post this to "Mechanical Engineering other topics"

BigInch-born in the trenches.

http://virtualpipeline.spaces.msn.com

 

[monkeysolder]

Thanks - I have cross posted it to the "MechE Other Topics" forum.

Please direct any replies to that thread.