Jules Richardson wrote: presumably I can't answer that. None of the 5.25' drives I worked on had a spring. You are probably right; the spring is way under a dollar, while the ferro seals were several dollars each. the to for about Can't answer 'cause again, I have never seen such a drive. But I find it very hard to believe that a drive manufacturer would design in the static discharge spring and then recommend it be disabled. Margins on disk drives are minuscule. Every item that can be cut, is. I know of entire teams working on 2 and 3 cent cost reductions. To add an unnecessary part costing a dollar is madness. I have changed dozens of heads and preamps blown by worn springs. So I'm a believer. I admit it. I've too many bad memories of loose or worn static springs destroying electronics. And, by the way, the discharge through the head creates an intense magnetic field and usually erases a chunk of data on the disk. It's a real nasty gotcha. I've worked daily with hard disk design since 1976, and static is one of the biggest nightmares in this world. It gets worse with time. Moving to the first MR heads, involved revamping the entire factory, eliminating any potential charge over 100 volts. GMR took that down to sub-10 volt. Now, with TunnelingMR and Perpendicular heads, the level goes down again. We are working with flying heights smaller than the wave length of visible light. So it doesn't take much of a charge to bridge the gap. And static also has some very exotic effects on magnetic domains in a modern head; a whole new industry has grown around suppressing static electricity in disk drive production. The older drives you are talking about don't share this new type of weirdness. But static was always a major problem because of the disk ripping through the air. Static is a natural consequence of the technology. the fix The springs are designed to wear, albeit slowly. You do not want any wear on the spindle. And it is normally a very hard stainless steel. The button on the spring is usually an ablative type of material so it will wear before the spindle. The squeal comes from uneven wear creating vibration. The same as the squeal from worn brakes on your car. The frequency is usually determined by the length of the spring and its tension. problem - useful Graphite was tried. And various type of grease. But you are dealing with a constantly spinning piece of metal. It usually sloughs off any lubricant quickly. And that creates a new problem of introducing contaminants all over the base of a drive. Eventually, some of them make it back through the breather filters or the bearings. And yes, the static spring had the same problem, though to a lesser degree. It was not the ideal solution by any means and was eliminated as quickly as possible. Billy