Odd Question: T61 at High Altitude

Hello everyone,

I am a student studying astronomy and frequently work at altitudes >14,000 feet. One problem I have is laptops keep dying at high altutitude...my toshiba died yesterday at 10K feet. Can anyone share their experience using T61 or any Lenovo laptops at high altitudes? My boss has a Fujitsu Toughbook that works pretty well at altitude but it weighs a ton and costs a lot more. My T61 is on its way so wondering if its safe to take it up to 14k feet.
Thanks for the help.
Vishnu

 

what exactly is happening to them?

 

I'm wondering why altitude could have an effect on laptop performance. .

Ok, quick search yielded this:
http://www.lightstalkers.org/high-altitude-laptop-problems-

It's supposed to be the difference in air pressure affecting the hard drive. Since most manufacturers use a mix of HD brands, it's hard to say if T61 would have problems or not.

 

Most of the time, the laptop becomes very slow and dies after 15 mins or so. I can boot it up and it does the same. The fan cycles a lot and the HDD makes a lot of noise. Yes I think its the difference in air pressure that affects the performace of the HDD.

 

You should look for a laptop with a solid state drive. Mechanical hard drives need the air to be thick enough for the head to fly above the platters.

 

Is it possible to replace the HDD in T61 with a solid state drive? Sorry if thats a stupid question.

 

Yes it is.

 

Just upgrade to a SSD. You can get a 32GB SSD for not too much. Be sure to look around first for prices and performance. There is a LOT of valuable info about SSDs on this forum.

 

Certainly. SSD are on the market but terribly expensive. They go for over $1000 for 64GB. T6x takes 2.5" SATA hard drive so you can use either 2.5" or 1.8" with a bay adapter.

Or you can use a CF to SATA adapter with a CF card.

 

are you in a plane or like a mountain?

 

more on a mountain. I use NASA Infred Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Get shipped out here half dozen times a year for 10 days or so at a time. I will look into a SSD and see if my advisor can pay since its work related

 

If your still looking at laptops the Panasonic Toughbooks are the most rugged however I don't know if they are high altitude resistant.

 

Might I direct you to this video...
Go here and press "view lenovovision now"
Then under the featured content box displaying all the videos, choose "weightless".

After watching that video, you'll find that Thinkpads are the only types of notebooks certified for space flight by NASA. I think that accreditation should help you out in your decision.

 

yes. I have seen Lenovo laptops on the space station on NASA TV. So I guess I should be good. In anycase I will return to Hawaii in May I will update you with what happens then. Thanks for all the help guys.

 

If the problem is air pressure why would space flight certification matter? All the shuttles are pressurized. Weightlessness is a completely different issue then extreme low pressures. Now if they show it working in the vacuum of space that would be different.

 

exactly. weightlessness has nothing to do with air pressure. Yes, I've seen the space station employing the Thinkpads as their main laptops. One has nothing to do with the other.

 

even with a ssd, do you think you still might have heat problems due to the lower fan efficiency at low air pressures?
(eg: http://www.comairrotron.com/high_altitude_cooling.shtml)

 

Hard drives aren't even actively cooled so I don't see that as a problem.
Hard drive is enclosed in its own compartment in the right palmrest area.

I didn't really think altitude had this much effect on computers to be honest.

 

i was wondering about the cpu (and video) heat... he mentioned that the fans ran a lot and the performance slowed and then died... so maybe the cpu was overheating, going into low power mode, and then locking? just wondering...

i guess we need to know what is meant by "died" in the original post... does a new hdd fix it? ...or just going back down the mountain?
(btw, seagate claims max operation altitude of 10000+ ft here (pdf).)

 

Aren't destktop harddrives hemertically sealed? Are laptop harddrives different?

 

If you look on a hard drive it says
'do not cover this hole'. I would assume that means it is not hermetically sealed.

 

Hard drives need some time to acclimate themselves to the local environs wrt. air pressure, temperature, and humidity before they're switched on.

Case in point: when a hard drive is stored at low ambient temperatures (like in the cargo hold of a high-altitude aircraft), powering the drive up immediately in a warm office, hotel room or the like where condensation can collect inside the drive can kill the hard drive dead. So it may be that the air pressure itself may not have all much to do with a drive's demise.

 

Interesting point about HDD acclimation. I typically dont go straight up to 14k feet. I stay at 9k feet for about 2 nights before heading to the summit. Not sure if thats enough time for the HDD to acclimate.

 

Quoted from http://www.acsdata.com/hard-drive-crash.htm:

 

What are others using / experiencing at the site? This must be a pretty computationally intensive place at the telescope. Do you have access to other workers to find out what has happened to their drives?

 

so is it really just that the hdds are failing? or are the computers themselves (like cpu/mb/etc) "dying" permanently?

if it's the drives, maybe a cheap/free solution, depending on what you need to run and how long you're up there, is to remove the hdd and boot from a usb key, or a live cd/dvd (eg knoppix, if you don't mind linux) with a usb key for saving... it's like a slower, smaller, student budget, ssd...

there're also drives like the "extreme environments" series from seagate. they're supposed to be good to above 16,000ft.