Multiple hard disk failures - coincidence ? (fwd)

[Gary Jennejohn]

Oops! Sent it to the wrong list.
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Gary Jennejohn / garyj[at]jennejohn.org gj[at]freebsd.org garyj[at]denx.de

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Peter Jeremy writes:
> On Sat, 2004-Dec-18 02:03:09 -0500, Gary Corcoran wrote:
> >I've just had *THREE* Maxtor 250GB hard disk failures on my
> >FreeBSD 4.10 server within a matter of days.  One I could
> >attribute to actual failure.  Two made me suspicious.  Three
> >has me wondering if this is some software problem...   (or
> >a conspiracy (just kidding) ;-) )
> 
> Seems unlikely that faulty server software could cause a disk failure.
> One possibility is that your power supply is a but stressed and the
> supply rails are out of tolerance.  The other possibility is that the
> drives are overheating.  Higher density drives will be more sensitive
> to both heat and dirty power.
> 

I'd argue for overheating. A guy I know recently had mysterious
crashes on a brand-new box with a large drive, in fact, I think it
was a 250Gb MAXTOR. The machine would run for a few minutes and
then just spontaneously reboot.

I told him it sounded like an overheating drive. After swapping out
practically every bit of hardware he finally got smart and put
the HD into a tray with a cooling fan. After that, all problems
disappeared.

And he only had *two* of these monsters in his machine!

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