Was up in the attic tonight looking for box 59 (I number the boxes, keep a written index of what's in each box number) which should be in space U but Isn't and ran across box 30 with the old hard drives in it.

Almost all of them were on their side, not flat. The fifteen or twenty Connor CP2064 drives were all fine the gaskets looked great. Of the dozen, or so, CP2084 drives, three or four had gooey gaskets. There was also a lot more variety in the CP2084 drives in terms of thickness and case details. I suspect there was a poor gasket material used on some drives and not others, not on the CP2064, e.g., and other materials are stable. The drives used in the Portable just seem to have hit the bad gasket material jackpot. It would be nice to identify the gasket materials by name though.