Re: Multitrack Live Recordings and Long Term Archival Media and procedures

Well, since i was very curious about this statement that you should
run a disc every 6 months or so to keep it ''alive'' i started to ask
some of my friends who are running these sort of network storage
clusters...
Maybe i wrote it wrong, they do not use ''only'' refurbished hd's (
ofcourse not ) but they do repair almost all of ''broken'' HD's to
keep the costs down.
It indeed happens often that a controller dies. This is a little bit
counter intuitive as one would think that mechanics wears.

But for a disk the mechanics are these days extremely simple (but with
very tight tolerances). As for the electronics I guess a disk
controller are almost complete computers with quite a bit of analogue
electronics.

You get problems with these kind of problems:
- electron migration, after microchips are hit with a jolt of static
electricity by improper handling they slowly chemically corrode on the
inside and finally die.
- zinc and tin whiskers, small thin electrically conductive hairs
formed from crystalline structures under pressure. zinc whiskers form
on the underside of the floor tiles of a raised data center floor,
when the tiles are moved the whiskers are air born and sucked inside
computers. tin whiskers form from solder joints of electronics, the
whiskers can easily grow to a size where it touches a neighbor pin.
old tin/lead alloys didn't have this problem, the new environmentally
friendly solder alloys pretty much guaranties that electronics will
fail within three years.
- solder joints can fail because of the constant vibrations especially
the new solders can handle these vibrations less well.

I have known a co-worker who mixed-and-matched boards and disk
assemblies to refurbish disks that failed for his own use. I have not
yet seen it happen that a data center does this themselves.


Cheers,
Take

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Greg, Denver and Me - Shmucks!
    ... (said the schmuck who's posting on Usenet instead of taking down the ... Christmas tree or going out in the cold to return a non-working new ... that assures not only the electronics are unusable but the disk ... not the disk itself ...
    (alt.support.diabetes)
  • Re: Recovery of Disk project update
    ... > basic/intermediate analog electromagnetics, learn assembly-level disk ... > PC harddrives and get them to work without using the built-in electronics, ... You will need to replace it with a suitable analog read-ONLY sensor as the ... alot of tests with dummy data A and dummy Data B and try to recover dummy ...
    (comp.sys.cbm)
  • Re: My first disk disaster!
    ... heard the disk spin up ... drive and swapped the electronics. ... drive with the electronics from the TiVo first, ... Check the connectors to the electronics board. ...
    (uk.comp.homebuilt)
  • Re: Greg, Denver and Me - Shmucks!
    ... Christmas tree or going out in the cold to return a non-working new ... concrete floor and jump on it severeal times. ... the microwave will effectively destroy the electronics in the HD case, but not the disk itself ...
    (alt.support.diabetes)
  • Re: lost emails
    ... If my husband has more questions about this can he contact ... and it is unusual for a hard disk to fail. ... transfer the electronics assembly to your disk. ... need to extract some emails that concern a lawsuit. ...
    (microsoft.public.outlook)