Comment by vidarh
3 years ago
To the last bit, I've seen this first hand. Had a whole RAID array of the infamous IBM DeathStar drives fail one after the other while we frantically copied data off.
Last time I ever had the same model drives in an array.
Heh, I remember in the early 1990s having a RAID array with a bunch of 4Gb IBM drives come up dead after a weekend powerdown for a physical move due to "stiction". I was on the phone with IBM, and they were telling me to physically bang the drives on the edge of desk to loosen them up. Didn't seem to be working, so their advice was "hit it harder!" When I protested, they said, "hey, it already doesn't work, what have you got to lose?" So I hit it harder. Eventually got enough drives to start up to get the array on line, and you better believe the first thing I did after that was create a fresh backup (not that we didn't have a recent backup anyway), and the 2nd thing I did was replace those drives, iirc, with Seagate Barracudas.
Ouch. I knew someone who claimed to have dealt with that or a similar effect after their cleaning person had pulled the plug on their servers by putting the drive in an oven while connected and heating it slowly.
Personally my most nailbiting period was when I got my first (20MB!) drive as a kid and it was too big an investment to replace even when it refused to spin up without me opening up the drive(!) and nudging the platter with my finger to help the motor spin it up... I backed everything up (on floppies), and stored everything important straight to floppies, but it was still more convenient to hold on to the HD for the next 6 months or so until I'd saved up enough to replace it...
It's remarkable what drives can survive if you're lucky... Also remarkable how quickly that luck can run out, though.
> "hey, it already doesn't work, what have you got to lose?"
This attitude has saved me more than once. Recognising when you can afford to do things that seems ridiculous helps surprisingly often.