On Mon, 2026-07-20 at 17:32 -0400, Frank Bures wrote: > I operated disk arrays with hundreds of HDD's in 00's. I had a peculiar > experience with WD HDD's that would simply start to disappear. There was > nothing interesting in SMART, the drive would just disconnect itself from > the array. It would suffice to pull the drive out and plug it back in and > it would populate itself again. However, the drive that started to do that > would ultimately "disappear" permanently, so we just replaced them > preventatively. Unfortunately, as the drive would seem to be OK during > tests, we were never able to apply WD warranty, unless the drive > "disappeared" permanently.
One contributor to device death is handling. There's the obvious of physical shock (being banged about in transit, installation, and operational vibration), and the less obvious one of static electricity. People tend to think of if static shock is going to kill something it'll do it while they'll handle it, and it'll be dead at first test. But that's not the case according to manufacturer testing that we were told about while studying electronics. They'd found that it weakened things, so that a device that would normally run 10 or 20 years before things like slight manufacturing defects eventually cause a problem, and natural chemical degradation of the parts spoils it, might fail in only 2 or 3 years, well before the device became outdated and was willingly replaced. And, of course, when something fails in 3 years time, you rarely associate that failure with how you handled the drive during the build. For some users, a three-year lifespan doesn't bother them. They want something bigger, faster, better, and a three-year-old computer is ancient in their eyes. I don't feel that way, it's wasteful, and annoying having to do so much maintenance work on servers. Electronic devices are forever being stressed by low-current high- voltage static discharges. You have a PC on the desk in a carpeted room, you walk over and start using it. If you haven't completely discharged yourself through the chair and table, and the table hasn't discharged itself through the PC sitting on, you're going to discharge yourself through the keyboard or mouse. You wipe the dust off your screen or keyboard, you're generating an electric charge. You blast the dust out of your PC with an annual clean-up... It all has a cumulative effect. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 (yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted) Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/new
