PrairieTek

PrairieTek was a hard drive manufacturer located in Longmont, Colorado in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It manufactured 5 and 10 megabyte "ruggedized" miniature hard drives for the laptop computer market. Unlike many manufacturers of the time, PrairieTek did not rest the drive heads on the disks, but instead used reverse EMF to park the drives on a spreader bar. While the concept promised to reduce the amount of wear on the drive heads and the disk, in practical application the heads came off the spreader bar too fast, and before the disk had come up to speed (creating an air cushion), which led to the heads impacting the disks and knocking loose magnetic media, shortening the life of the drive to months or weeks.