[Techtalk] Drive Failures

[Robert Wichert]

My immediate reaction was "Heat".

Are they somehow located in an area of the case without adequate
cooling?  Could you put some sort of heat sensor on the drive? Like
http://www.mv.com/ipusers/paperthermometer/ 

Robert Wichert




=======================================

Anthony Gorecki wrote:
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> Hello,
> 
> Over the past five months, I have had six separate hard drives fail either
> during the initial deployment of a server, or during its active operation.
> While two of the older drives failed for legitimate reasons, the remaining
> four failures are a cause for concern.
> 
> In all cases, the drives would shut down at random times, some of which were
> shortly after powering on the system. All of the damaged drives were tested
> in normal systems to confirm that the failure was not local only to one
> server, and were ultimately unusable.
> 
> Although data contained within the drives was left undamaged and could be
> accessed during the times where the drives were operational, they would
> continually power down, often for no identifiable reason. Operation of the
> drives would frequently resume for a period of a few minutes after an
> automatic reset from the kernel or BIOS, generally with mixed degrees of
> success, only to have the problem persist.
> 
> Having lost another drive this afternoon in the same system which housed the
> previous three failures, it's fairly obvious to assume that the problem must
> be a local one. Although I may have been willing to accept the previous
> failures of older drives to be an unfortunate string of bad luck, I don't see
> a viable explanation for the failure of a relatively newer drive, which has
> never had a history of reliability issues.
> 
> Other servers which are running on the same electical and internet lines have
> been functional for months with no abnormal hardware failures, therefore I
> believe building-wide dirty power is not a likely cause of the problem.
> Considering that no other hardware from the system in question has failed, I
> believe that the problem is local to the motherboard, rather than any of the
> other hardware.
> 
> Before the motherboard and power supply are replaced, does anyone have
> suggestions or a possible explanation for these hardware failures?
> 
> - --
> Best Regards,
> Anthony Gorecki
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