One of the mainframe guys I used to work with in the late 90's had a photo of one of the platters from the hard disk embedded in the server room wall, this was one of those early IBM beasts with 24 inch platters that had a catastrophic failure.
One of the mainframe guys I used to work with in the late 90's had a photo of one of the platters from the hard disk embedded in the server room wall, this was one of those early IBM beasts with 24 inch platters that had a catastrophic failure.
I suspect that was a very old photograph, because I heard a similar story in the 1960s. The drive was the IBM 1301, a very large disk drive. According to the story, if a head crashed in the outer track, it provided enough torque to snap the arm holding the head and hurl it out of the drive with enough force to beak the class door and embed itself in the wall. We ran out two IBM 1301s close to the wall and facing it, so if something like that happened only the wall would be damaged.
I heard a story many years ago of a tech who went to investigate a cascading failure in a row of washing machine hard drives. A single platter had failed, which damaged the head. They thought maybe it was just the pack which was faulty, so they put in a new pack, and destroyed that as well. So they thought maybe it was the drive which was failing, so they put the first failed pack in another drive, and destroyed the head on that as well. Their attempts to figure out what was wrong ended up killing three or four disk packs and as many drives.
When the tech turned up, he ran his finger around the inside of the mouth of the drive, and his finger came out covered in red dust. "What's that?" the customer asked. "Data," he replied.
I heard a simpler version of that story, involving the IBM 2311. An operator installed an IBM 1316 disk pack on a drive, but the operating sytem did not recognize it. He moved the pack to another drive but it still was not recognized. After trying all available drives, unsuccessfully, he called for IBM Field Service, who determined that the defective disk pack had damaged all of the drives.
Considering that moving the disk pack to another drive was the only thing the operator could do, this may have happe
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hard drive (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the mainframe guys I used to work with in the late 90's had a photo of one of the platters from the hard disk embedded in the server room wall, this was one of those early IBM beasts with 24 inch platters that had a catastrophic failure.
I suspect that was a very old photograph, because I heard a similar story in the 1960s. The drive was the IBM 1301, a very large disk drive. According to the story, if a head crashed in the outer track, it provided enough torque to snap the arm holding the head and hurl it out of the drive with enough force to beak the class door and embed itself in the wall. We ran out two IBM 1301s close to the wall and facing it, so if something like that happened only the wall would be damaged.
Re:hard drive (Score:5, Funny)
I heard a story many years ago of a tech who went to investigate a cascading failure in a row of washing machine hard drives. A single platter had failed, which damaged the head. They thought maybe it was just the pack which was faulty, so they put in a new pack, and destroyed that as well. So they thought maybe it was the drive which was failing, so they put the first failed pack in another drive, and destroyed the head on that as well. Their attempts to figure out what was wrong ended up killing three or four disk packs and as many drives.
When the tech turned up, he ran his finger around the inside of the mouth of the drive, and his finger came out covered in red dust.
"What's that?" the customer asked.
"Data," he replied.
Re: (Score:2)
I heard a simpler version of that story, involving the IBM 2311. An operator installed an IBM 1316 disk pack on a drive, but the operating sytem did not recognize it. He moved the pack to another drive but it still was not recognized. After trying all available drives, unsuccessfully, he called for IBM Field Service, who determined that the defective disk pack had damaged all of the drives.
Considering that moving the disk pack to another drive was the only thing the operator could do, this may have happe