Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 23:00:16 -0400 From: Mark Mayo <mark@quickweb.com> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: HD failure; possible causes?? Message-ID: <19970919230016.40089@vinyl.quickweb.com>
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Hi all. Well, this weekend I had a couple of CCD disk arrays go belly up, and I'm curious if anyone has had any experience with multiple disks crashing at once. Originally I thought one of the disks in the pair had crashed, but when I sent the drives to a data recovery place the guy informed me that both disks were pooched - both of them had the heads physically touch the media, destroying the platters and all data of course. One of the disks was an old Seagate Baracuda (the 2XL I think) and one was a relatively new Quantum (Fireball). I've had several of the older Baracudas blow up in the past, which is what I assumed happened here. Needless to say I was quite surprised to learn that the Quantum suffered the same death - at the same time presumably... According to the data recovery guy, when 2 disks fail like this simultaneously in about 80% of the cases he sees the cause of the problem was not the disks themselves, but the computer or disk tower. My disks were held in a pretty decent tower from Open Storage Solutions, with redundant power supplies and redundant cooling. Typically, very reliable disk towers and I've never had a problem with them in the past. Both te computer and the disk tower were plugged into a nice 1400VA APC UPS - so I really doubt there was a power surge or anything that got to the drives... Naturally I'm quite a bit worried that this might happen again, or to other disks in the tower... So this leaves me with a possible problem with the computer. The guy said "the motherboard"... I'm having a really hard time imagining how the computer could have cause the destruction of 2 disks. Yet the odds seems low enough for 2 disks to die in unison (plus the advice of the "expert") that I'm trying to imagine where the problem could lie. Maybe the old Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller? The only reasonable event I can think of would be some sort of static discharge along the SCSI cable. Anyhow, if any body has any experience with drive failures I'd love to hear from you!! This whole event has me very nervous! :-) TIA, -Mark -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Mayo mark@quickweb.com RingZero Comp. http://vinyl.quickweb.com/mark finger mark@quickweb.com for my PGP key and GCS code ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The newest book, The Dilbert Future, took a broader view, describing how idiots will threaten every aspect of business, technology and society in the future." --Scott Adams
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