Re:hard drives die at high altitude (Score 5, Interesting)

You will want to use a solid state disk when you are at Everest base camp.
If you read about computers used there, the hard drives fail very quickly due to low air pressure.
Hard drives are not rated to work at 18,000 feet.

Very True. Dan Reed describes his experience with high altitude and hard drives here: http://hpcdanreed.typepad.com/reeds_ruminations/2007/08/yo-head-crashes.html#more "In an earlier blog posting, I mentioned that I was on my way to western China, to give a keynote talk at GCC2007 in Urumchi, which is in northwest China.....Needing a digital fix and wondering about network connectivity in Tibet, I turned on my IBM ThinkPad. Windows Vista booted normally, and my applications began loading. Life was good. Then, I saw the dreaded blue screen of death, followed by a message that struck terror in my heart: Disk read error Ctrl-Alt-Del to retry....... ...........The first night in Tibet, I awoke around 3 AM with a massive headache, one of those "Oh, please, bludgeon me into unconsciousness so the pain goes away" migraines from altitude sickness. I was having a second head crash, the biological kind this time., ......... ....I've been reflecting on the irony that my disk crash and altitude sickness were due to the same physics that dominates much of my professional life: the Navier-Stokes equations. Beguilingly simple to derive, yet fiendishly complex to evaluate, these differential equations are an application of Newton's second law to describe fluid flows in a wide range of physical situations:....