Data (Self) Distruction
It's been a while since I've had to deal with a drive that committed suicide. You can tell when the inner bits of a drive are acting less like a disk drive and more like a grinder, or a weed-whacker, especially the bit where the devices starts to heat up due to internal friction and the resistance load caused by needing more and more power to forcibly drag the inner bits of the drive over the platter, scraping fragments off as they go along.
Suffice to say, the data on this thing was toast. The irony is that I was going to take the machine out of service specifically to clone the data to a new drive because the damage it would have caused by dying was growing as we started using it more. It's Murphy. A power outage forced my hand, and I had to power it off for the first time in several years. I guess the drive was ready to go.
A post mortem revealed, unexpectedly, that the heads on the drive, the tiny, tissue-thin micro-sensitive nubs that literally fly over the platters on a cushion of air. appeared to have had an accident. Somehow the servo arms had backed the heads into a section of the drive that was already occupied by something else... causing several of the heads to become mangled. This caused problems when the servo arms swung the other way to glide them over the platter, akin to derailing a train, and then expecting the mangled wreckage to pass unscathed through the a narrow tunnel...
I have copies of the data, but not of the server settings, so I get to spend a weekend rebuilding a server and configuring it.
Suffice to say, the data on this thing was toast. The irony is that I was going to take the machine out of service specifically to clone the data to a new drive because the damage it would have caused by dying was growing as we started using it more. It's Murphy. A power outage forced my hand, and I had to power it off for the first time in several years. I guess the drive was ready to go.
A post mortem revealed, unexpectedly, that the heads on the drive, the tiny, tissue-thin micro-sensitive nubs that literally fly over the platters on a cushion of air. appeared to have had an accident. Somehow the servo arms had backed the heads into a section of the drive that was already occupied by something else... causing several of the heads to become mangled. This caused problems when the servo arms swung the other way to glide them over the platter, akin to derailing a train, and then expecting the mangled wreckage to pass unscathed through the a narrow tunnel...
I have copies of the data, but not of the server settings, so I get to spend a weekend rebuilding a server and configuring it.