On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 00:13 -0400, Claude Jones wrote: > For those of you discussing failure of hard drives the Google Hard > Drive study may be of interest if you haven't read it - some > surprising findings, including that smart is not so smart I'd come to that conclusion about smart, myself, after a few drives dying without it saying a thing, and it complaining about drives that are quite fine. I have read others say to just take it as yet another warning. The bits of the hard drive study that I read, before, weren't too surprising. Within a reasonably wide range of temperatures things were usually quite okay, but going over them (heatwise, at least) isn't too hard, and the errors get radically worse quite quickly. Hard drive cooling is virtually not done in PCs, except for the really geeky. It's easy, in some climates, to really roast a drive. Putting a fan on a drive in a flakey Windows box put an end to its flakeyness. Of course, Windows never gave any indication that it was crashing because the hard drive wasn't working well. It was a later installation of Linux that indicated the hard drive wasn't working well. And pulling the box apart let me feel a painfully hot hard drive. Electronics servicing is one of the things I do, and that felt far hotter than I felt was good for electronic parts. I can remember avoiding getting a computer with a hard drive back in the 1980s, for quite some time. Our school still had one of those Apple ][ machines with a really dire set of floppy drives, that required all sorts of tricks to read some disks to read (half opening the latch, running them on their side, on a diagonal, or upside down, etc.). I figured it was bad enough losing the data from one floppy, I didn't fancy the idea of several tens of megabytes going just as easily (I didn't think that the technology was going to be really much better in hard drives). Years later we had the opposite experience. One child grabbed a disk and mangled it. Despite the disc being quite full of bends and folds, it still worked. ;-) -- [tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 i686 i386 Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7. Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
