Douglas Quebbeman wrote: I used to make some of the prototype PC Boards for DMA Systems (since sold to IIRC Ricoh) removeable hard drives. When I was up in engineering, one of the engineers told me running them out in the open air doesn't really hurt them, at least for the evaluation/troubleshooting they were doing. It was not recommended though in a dusty or smoke filled environment :). I still have one of their PC Boards with the programmed CPU and schematic for disk testing. Never took the time to build it up, but I wanted one ... just because :).