It's a bad day when...

[techfuzz]

2 different hard drives in your computer decide to go belly up for no apparent reason except that they were old and they had finally had enough. So long 80GB and 120GB drives I guess when the 120GB went to the junkyard, the 80GB couldn't go on living without him so less than 24 hours later it lied down and gracefully died too. No clicks of death, burning smells, or grinding sounds, just a report of bad sectors and then.... dead.

So now I've just lost almost half of my hard drive space, my last file backup, an entire website in development, and a couple hundred MP3's. DAMN!

What does this teach us kids? That's right, hard drives die when you least expect it and there's nothing you can do about it!

I think I'll go watch a movie that has stuff blowing up in it

techfuzz

PS - DAMN!!

 

[caberguy]

I feel your pain. In August all three of my systems died in the same week. My main gaming/surfing rig burned out a PSU. My #2 desktop fried a RAM module. And my monitor on my Laptop bit it. Luckily I didn't lose my Dissertation in the process...

 

[Slugbait]

Let me guess...you named your hard drives Big Dan and Little Ann

j/k

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Or when you come to the sudden realization that you are working 3 of 4 8-hour shifts to cover someone going to the doctor....

I just hope that I can sleep during my 8 hours off, otherwise the 16 hour shift is giong to be complete hell....

 

[GalvanizedYankee]

Originally posted by: techfuzz
2 different hard drives in your computer decide to go belly up for no apparent reason except that they were old and they had finally had enough. So long 80GB and 120GB drives I guess when the 120GB went to the junkyard, the 80GB couldn't go on living without him so less than 24 hours later it lied down and gracefully died too. No clicks of death, burning smells, or grinding sounds, just a report of bad sectors and then.... dead.

So now I've just lost almost half of my hard drive space, my last file backup, an entire website in development, and a couple hundred MP3's. DAMN!

What does this teach us kids? That's right, hard drives die when you least expect it and there's nothing you can do about it!

I think I'll go watch a movie that has stuff blowing up in it

techfuzz

PS - DAMN!!

Two HDDs in one machine in 24 hours?!? Suspect the PSU sending out spikes at boot on the 5V rail killing the logic chip on the HDD. Are you running an Antec True or SmartPower?

 

[techfuzz]

Originally posted by: GalvanizedYankee
Two HDDs in one machine in 24 hours?!? Suspect the PSU sending out spikes at boot on the 5V rail killing the logic chip on the HDD. Are you running an Antec True or SmartPower?

Neither of those PSU's. It's a Cooler Master and has been rock solid since I got it. I think the 120GB started having problems last week and I just didn't notice it at the time. I thought it was something else going wrong. I had a matching 80GB drive that I bought at the same time as the one that died today. It died about 6 months ago of the click of death.

techfuzz

 

[techfuzz]

Turns out only 1 hard drive went bad; I tested both drives in another computer and only the 120GB is toast. The 80GB passed every test. I believe, but I haven't confirmed, that the second IDE channel on my motherboard got fried by the drive that went bad. I need to do some switching around of devices to test this theory.

techfuzz

 

[Paperdoc]

In case it helps you feel better to hear of someone else's pain:

This happened to the IT Dept. at a former employer. They were doing ALL the right things. The server was running a RAID 5 array with daily incremental backups to an off-site storage location. And then one day it crapped out - one HDD in the array failed with errors. First problem was they had no HDD to replace it with, and the supplier did not, either. They had to fly in a HDD replacement. Once it was installed, they discovered that a SECOND HDD in the array also had failed with errors, AND the RAID 5 controller had a firmware problem. Bottom line, they could not auto-restore the data to the array. It all had to be done from the backup tapes. So they went to work and restored the business-critical data and apps first, then the rest of the system. It took 3 days at 24 hours/day to get it all running again! And on a RAID 5 system that is never supposed to let you down!

 

[techfuzz]

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
And on a RAID 5 system that is never supposed to let you down!

Never say never with RAID 5. Just as you described, 2 disks down and your SOL. We've had disks and RAID controllers periodically die where I work too, but fortunately we've never lost anything completely and had to do a full restore from tape. We're about to implement a disk-to-disk backup SAN that I'm sure would cut our restore time from days to a day if we ever lost everything on a sever and had to go to the most recent complete backup.

techfuzz

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: techfuzz

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
And on a RAID 5 system that is never supposed to let you down!

Never say never with RAID 5. Just as you described, 2 disks down and your SOL. We've had disks and RAID controllers periodically die where I work too, but fortunately we've never lost anything completely and had to do a full restore from tape. We're about to implement a disk-to-disk backup SAN that I'm sure would cut our restore time from days to a day if we ever lost everything on a sever and had to go to the most recent complete backup.

techfuzz

Worst thing you can say "I can't imagine it getting any worse than this!" :Q

Story time.

I remember that happening with an IBM Netfinity server with a large RAID5 array. The DLT drive was broken for weeks so the backup was way out of date. :Q

One morning the caution sign was on (looks like the yellow road sign with an exclamation point) and the RAID console said the R5 logical drive was degraded due to a defunct drive and that drive had a red light on the carrier.

MIS said no big deal, the guy with the replacement is coming right away. They said everything is fine as long as you don't lose another. So I asked what happens if we lose another? They said don't worry about it, the chances of losing another drive are like getting struck by lightning. Not a minute after I hang up guess what happens?

That's the only bad thing about R5.

Turns out the backplane in the server was bad and was killing drives. It cost over $45,000 in the end because the tape that was good was a QUARTER behind and a handful of people had to be brought in to enter everything on paper back into the system. :roll:

 

[Aikouka]

I lost two full HDDs within the span of two days once... a 250GB and a 200GB. I still haven't figured out what I've lost yet, but luckily, I was able to get the 200GB to be recognized by Windows long enough to grab most (some files reported an "Invalid MS DOS Command Copy" error when trying to copy them... first time I've ever seen that error ) of the files. However, the 250GB drive was toast and just made pretty beep-code music.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn

Originally posted by: techfuzz

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
And on a RAID 5 system that is never supposed to let you down!

Never say never with RAID 5. Just as you described, 2 disks down and your SOL. We've had disks and RAID controllers periodically die where I work too, but fortunately we've never lost anything completely and had to do a full restore from tape. We're about to implement a disk-to-disk backup SAN that I'm sure would cut our restore time from days to a day if we ever lost everything on a sever and had to go to the most recent complete backup.

techfuzz

Worst thing you can say "I can't imagine it getting any worse than this!" :Q

Story time.

I remember that happening with an IBM Netfinity server with a large RAID5 array. The DLT drive was broken for weeks so the backup was way out of date. :Q

Got to IBM and did not need to read further. My hate for IBM was cemented with having RAID5 arrays go Tango Uniform because of stiction in their SCSI drives and multiple drives doing it and failing in other ways. Backup rules! This was while we were starting to see Deathstars fail.

 

[techfuzz]

Originally posted by: gsellis
This was while we were starting to see Deathstars fail.

I lost all 4 Deathstars I bought well before any drive hit their 2 year mark. I had one that didn't make it 6 months.

About 3-4 years ago at the place I work, we had a batch of 10-20 computers all bought around the same time and all lost their drives within weeks of each other. I can't remember which manufacturer it was, but it was either WD or Seagate.

techfuzz

 

[Oyeve]

At my job all 50 mac systems that were purchased and deployed around the same time all had IBM deathstars in them. A few months later I spent over a week replacing ALL of the IBMs and they literally died one after the other. We still call it "Mac week from hell". We talk about it everytime we go out for drinks.

 

[techfuzz]

Turns out after some moving and reconfiguring, the second IDE channel on my motherboard has gone the way of the dodo. I still lost a 120GB drive, but the 80GB drive survived. Maybe when the 120GB died it fried something on the second IDE channel. Oh well, I still have 2 more SATA ports if I need to expand hard drive space again before I replace the whole motherboard.

techfuzz

 

[imported_goku]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn

Originally posted by: techfuzz

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
And on a RAID 5 system that is never supposed to let you down!

Never say never with RAID 5. Just as you described, 2 disks down and your SOL. We've had disks and RAID controllers periodically die where I work too, but fortunately we've never lost anything completely and had to do a full restore from tape. We're about to implement a disk-to-disk backup SAN that I'm sure would cut our restore time from days to a day if we ever lost everything on a sever and had to go to the most recent complete backup.

techfuzz

Worst thing you can say "I can't imagine it getting any worse than this!" :Q

Story time.

I remember that happening with an IBM Netfinity server with a large RAID5 array. The DLT drive was broken for weeks so the backup was way out of date. :Q

One morning the caution sign was on (looks like the yellow road sign with an exclamation point) and the RAID console said the R5 logical drive was degraded due to a defunct drive and that drive had a red light on the carrier.

MIS said no big deal, the guy with the replacement is coming right away. They said everything is fine as long as you don't lose another. So I asked what happens if we lose another? They said don't worry about it, the chances of losing another drive are like getting struck by lightning. Not a minute after I hang up guess what happens?

That's the only bad thing about R5.

Turns out the backplane in the server was bad and was killing drives. It cost over $45,000 in the end because the tape that was good was a QUARTER behind and a handful of people had to be brought in to enter everything on paper back into the system. :roll:

Who are you and what do you do?

 

[piasabird]

Bad power supplies can kill hard drives very easily.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Fullmetal Chocobo
Or when you come to the sudden realization that you are working 3 of 4 8-hour shifts to cover someone going to the doctor....

????

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Can you say Dell GX270? We had about 150 or so in the environment when it happened. About a year to the day of them being built they would all stop working due to a bad set of capacitors. Well out of the 150 we had, about 120 or so died within a week.