6 ms·

Back in the mid 90s I was working in IT at a midsized company. We used Compaq desktops (this is the Pentium Pro timeframe). The HD in the system where quantum f

Back in the mid 90s I was working in IT at a midsized company. We used Compaq desktops (this is the Pentium Pro timeframe). The HD in the system where quantum fireball (IIRC). They failed at an amazing rate all in the first 3 months (30%). We called Compaq at one point and said, look we want replacement drives for all of our remaining systems. After much back and forth (stupid on their part as we had 1000+ machines over their complete line, including servers, so good customer) they refused to help saying “we will only replace them as they fail.” Fine, as you wish. A week later we called into support and reported the failure of 50 HD. They did not believe us. Sent 3 technicians. After they tested the 20th HD the look on their face was priceless. At some point one of the techs noticed the taser on the one of the other work benches in IT. An hour later we received a call from the sale rep telling us that they would replace all the current drives in every system with this model as long as there are no more “mass failures.”

Lammy 5y ago
Were they Fireball SE maybe? http://www.redhill.net.au/d/74.php http://www.redhill.net.au/d/74.php "In the case of the Fireball SE, the mounting of the [power] socket was so flimsy that it was all too easy to break the PCB and thus ruin the drive. (With most other drives, you would have to be a gorilla and a drunken one at that.)"
grp000 5y ago
I'm not familiar with data center tools or terminology. What is a tazer in this context?
- lloeki 5y ago
  IIUC the same as in other contexts, the subtext being that in face of their refusal to replace these doomed HDs before a failure has registered, the failures were made to prematurely happen with a gentle stream of electrons.
  - myrandomcomment 5y ago
    Correct. To the other comments. We where a good customer that experienced an amazing stupidly high failure rate in a part that others also reported the same issue. The cost of deploying these systems and having them fail randomly broke planning and wasted the teams time and impacted our IT cost metrics. The cost of the support ticket, time and replacing and re-imaging a system was not free. We of course tried very hard to be preemptive in sorting this once we ID’ the issue. The vendor did not care, so another path was taken in order to help express our unhappiness to the vendor which resolve the issue. We paid additional money by paying for a brand name vs for white box with the idea that we would prevent this type of failure.
    - th0ma5 5y ago
      I mean at first it sounded like fraud, but then you explained it, and then it really sounded like fraud.
      - mordae 5y ago
        Nah, it's fair. We've had to fry our failed HDDs because otherwise the vendor would replace them with those we've returned previously. Then they would not endure RAID rebuild and the cycle would repeat.
        TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
        The fraud is theirs. But you're supposed to hide the murder weapon.
        ta988 5y ago
        Not keeping track of serial numbers?
        starfallg 5y ago
        Refurbished drives get their firmware and NVRAM overwritten. The subsequent units have different serial numbers and the labels get replaced.
- vincnetas 5y ago
  Read same and could not believe that author is calling them selves "good customer" and meantime also intentionally failing hard drives with teaser. Some mental gymnastics there ;)
  - myrandomcomment 5y ago
    It is an amusing story from a completely different time and place in IT. Today people would just loudly and publicly complain on Twitter and other social media to embarrass the vendor into sorting it. Sharing a story, not speaking to the nature or the correctness of the solution. I have worked on both sides. Once when I was on the vendor side a very large customer returned a very expensive switch as RMA. A set of 16 ports stopped working. The cause in the end, the customer had gotten an SFP stuck and tried to rip it out, pulling the cage from its solder joints on the board. 3 switches in 2 months. We smiled, swapped all of them and then the sales team had a chat with the customer to help resolve the issue (their 3rd party SFP with a crappy designed latch). Is what it is.
    - vincnetas 5y ago
      My understanding is that having crappy latch design is incomparable to intentionally frying hard drives with taser.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Sibling comments have answered this correctly, but I like to imagine it was there as a threat to the Compaq visitors, like one might leave a loaded gun in a visible spot to facilitate negotiation.
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    In these parts we threaten to withhold biscuits from meetings. Sometimes we really mean it. Escalating straight to firearms sounds a little bit excessive.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
      Are you in England?
      - gerdesj 5y ago
        Yes, towards the bottom left of it.
        beervirus 5y ago
        Tasers aren’t really firearms. Also I’m guessing this was more of a stun gun anyway.
        WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        On the weapon scale, taser is a lot closer to gun than biscuit.
        giaour 5y ago
        I am impressed that your weapon scale goes all the way to biscuit! I guess a stale one could serve as a projectile
        5y ago
- csharptwdec19 5y ago
  I would assume it had a purpose similar to an EtherKiller [0]. Most experienced Shop techs have at least a couple of similar tools to assist with recalcitrant RMA departments. Unless it's a Creative labs product. You'll never RMA one of those. Ever. [0] - http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/ http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Hmm connecting directly to 110V is both dangerous as not limited in amperage (except by the fuse which is way too high for this purpose) and in some cases not enough (e.g. some ethernet has 1.5kV protection) It would be better to slowly raise the voltage until it blows, leading to minimal pyrotechnics on the components (smoke/burning)
  - FooHentai 5y ago
    In the early 2000s I 'successfully' RMAd a Creative Labs Nomad Muvo MP3 player. The replacement was a different color, capacity, and had someone else's music on it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
b3lvedere 5y ago
I remember a time when Compaq used the Quantum Bigfoot (5.25" harddrive) in their workstations. They were noisy and slow. They were also mounted upside down. The failure rate was very high.
- bluedino 5y ago
  Ahh, the Quantum Bigfoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot A massive drive. I worked in computer retail at the time, and I lost count of how many customers brought their Compaq Presarios in, DOA, and one of those drives inside. We'd sell them a new hard drive off the shelf, install it and send them on their way (they were out of warranty, of course).
htek 5y ago
I recall a similar experience with a particularly poor-performing $10k+ 3D graphics card for CAD/CAM back in the 90s. It had gone back and forth multiple times for crashing the system, locking up and just plain chugging along relative to the other cards we purchased. The problem was definitely the card, but the vendor claimed there was nothing wrong. Every time it was sent back to us there were more wire traces added to the card and other rework done with no explanation. After running a pair of probes hooked up to 110vac along the fingers of the VESA bus connection on the video card (and a few microprocessor chips exploded), the scorch marks were cleaned up and it was sent back one more time. We finally did get a new card that worked perfectly along with a long, vaguely threatening letter. Sometimes the clearest path is through the mud.
notacoward 5y ago
Had a similar experience at a previous job. I'd debugged a problem with one system down to a flaky drive, which I extracted and took to our sysadmin. Without hesitation, he slammed it down on the floor. "It's not flaky now." The thing is, I knew a lot more than he did about how hard drives work, but he knew a lot more about how vendors work. A flaky drive might be hard to replace. A dead one wouldn't. Lesson learned.
- jgalt212 5y ago
  My boss at a drug store did the same thing to a moderately damaged case of product X (no longer remember). He dropped it a few times and made sure it was unequivocally damaged and called the vendor.
Inhibit 5y ago
Ours was Western Digital. I worked at a VAR before the turn of the century and there was a rumored clean room problem at WD. We had over a hundred drives that failed but they flat refused to acknowledge the problem. Ended up having to kill the drives on a dedicated rig and send them back to keep our customers from having issues. They knew they were bad but refused to accept them back prior to failure. For a while they were returning a failing drive on the RMA too.
dtmmax33 5y ago
I worked tech support for a large desktop line. This was around 96 and pentium 133 days. We had a large batch of HD's that would fail. Funny thing is, a nice slap on the side of the tower would get them working again. Many times the customer would be satisfied with the solution, but I had to keep them on the line so I could get them a replacement. Can't remember which manufacture the HD's were, but rumor was that a truck broke down in the desert and it degraded the grease inside. So, they would work for a while but then lock up if drive stayed off for a while.
salmo 5y ago
Yep. We had maybe 60 of these. I think 2GB, but can’t remember for sure. We were all Compaq desktops and servers (Toshiba laptops for sales) but much smaller so no clout. We bought some drives to rotate while we waited for RMAs, but the ones we got back failed too, so we just ended up keeping a stack of drives ready to swap. They sat next to the spare dongles for the PCMCIA Ethernet cards, that the sales folks would inevitably break by tilting the laptop on it to get at a piece of paper on their desk. That was a fun time being a small IT shop playing with WinNT and early Linux. We did everything from writing internal apps to running Ethernet. 3 guys in a glorified closet using post-its as our ticketing/user story system. Very IT Crowd.

Lammy 5y ago

Were they Fireball SE maybe? http://www.redhill.net.au/d/74.php http://www.redhill.net.au/d/74.php "In the case of the Fireball SE, the mounting of the [power] socket was so flimsy that it was all too easy to break the PCB and thus ruin the drive. (With most other drives, you would have to be a gorilla and a drunken one at that.)"

grp000 5y ago

I'm not familiar with data center tools or terminology. What is a tazer in this context?

lloeki 5y ago
IIUC the same as in other contexts, the subtext being that in face of their refusal to replace these doomed HDs before a failure has registered, the failures were made to prematurely happen with a gentle stream of electrons.
- myrandomcomment 5y ago
  Correct. To the other comments. We where a good customer that experienced an amazing stupidly high failure rate in a part that others also reported the same issue. The cost of deploying these systems and having them fail randomly broke planning and wasted the teams time and impacted our IT cost metrics. The cost of the support ticket, time and replacing and re-imaging a system was not free. We of course tried very hard to be preemptive in sorting this once we ID’ the issue. The vendor did not care, so another path was taken in order to help express our unhappiness to the vendor which resolve the issue. We paid additional money by paying for a brand name vs for white box with the idea that we would prevent this type of failure.
  - th0ma5 5y ago
    I mean at first it sounded like fraud, but then you explained it, and then it really sounded like fraud.
    - mordae 5y ago
      Nah, it's fair. We've had to fry our failed HDDs because otherwise the vendor would replace them with those we've returned previously. Then they would not endure RAID rebuild and the cycle would repeat.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
        The fraud is theirs. But you're supposed to hide the murder weapon.
      - ta988 5y ago
        Not keeping track of serial numbers?
        starfallg 5y ago
        Refurbished drives get their firmware and NVRAM overwritten. The subsequent units have different serial numbers and the labels get replaced.
vincnetas 5y ago
Read same and could not believe that author is calling them selves "good customer" and meantime also intentionally failing hard drives with teaser. Some mental gymnastics there ;)
- myrandomcomment 5y ago
  It is an amusing story from a completely different time and place in IT. Today people would just loudly and publicly complain on Twitter and other social media to embarrass the vendor into sorting it. Sharing a story, not speaking to the nature or the correctness of the solution. I have worked on both sides. Once when I was on the vendor side a very large customer returned a very expensive switch as RMA. A set of 16 ports stopped working. The cause in the end, the customer had gotten an SFP stuck and tried to rip it out, pulling the cage from its solder joints on the board. 3 switches in 2 months. We smiled, swapped all of them and then the sales team had a chat with the customer to help resolve the issue (their 3rd party SFP with a crappy designed latch). Is what it is.
  - vincnetas 5y ago
    My understanding is that having crappy latch design is incomparable to intentionally frying hard drives with taser.
Y_Y 5y ago
Sibling comments have answered this correctly, but I like to imagine it was there as a threat to the Compaq visitors, like one might leave a loaded gun in a visible spot to facilitate negotiation.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  In these parts we threaten to withhold biscuits from meetings. Sometimes we really mean it. Escalating straight to firearms sounds a little bit excessive.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
    Are you in England?
    - gerdesj 5y ago
      Yes, towards the bottom left of it.
      - beervirus 5y ago
        Tasers aren’t really firearms. Also I’m guessing this was more of a stun gun anyway.
        WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        On the weapon scale, taser is a lot closer to gun than biscuit.
        giaour 5y ago
        I am impressed that your weapon scale goes all the way to biscuit! I guess a stale one could serve as a projectile
        5y ago
csharptwdec19 5y ago
I would assume it had a purpose similar to an EtherKiller [0]. Most experienced Shop techs have at least a couple of similar tools to assist with recalcitrant RMA departments. Unless it's a Creative labs product. You'll never RMA one of those. Ever. [0] - http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/ http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Hmm connecting directly to 110V is both dangerous as not limited in amperage (except by the fuse which is way too high for this purpose) and in some cases not enough (e.g. some ethernet has 1.5kV protection) It would be better to slowly raise the voltage until it blows, leading to minimal pyrotechnics on the components (smoke/burning)
- FooHentai 5y ago
  In the early 2000s I 'successfully' RMAd a Creative Labs Nomad Muvo MP3 player. The replacement was a different color, capacity, and had someone else's music on it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

b3lvedere 5y ago

I remember a time when Compaq used the Quantum Bigfoot (5.25" harddrive) in their workstations. They were noisy and slow. They were also mounted upside down. The failure rate was very high.

bluedino 5y ago
Ahh, the Quantum Bigfoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot A massive drive. I worked in computer retail at the time, and I lost count of how many customers brought their Compaq Presarios in, DOA, and one of those drives inside. We'd sell them a new hard drive off the shelf, install it and send them on their way (they were out of warranty, of course).

htek 5y ago

I recall a similar experience with a particularly poor-performing $10k+ 3D graphics card for CAD/CAM back in the 90s. It had gone back and forth multiple times for crashing the system, locking up and just plain chugging along relative to the other cards we purchased. The problem was definitely the card, but the vendor claimed there was nothing wrong. Every time it was sent back to us there were more wire traces added to the card and other rework done with no explanation. After running a pair of probes hooked up to 110vac along the fingers of the VESA bus connection on the video card (and a few microprocessor chips exploded), the scorch marks were cleaned up and it was sent back one more time. We finally did get a new card that worked perfectly along with a long, vaguely threatening letter. Sometimes the clearest path is through the mud.

notacoward 5y ago

Had a similar experience at a previous job. I'd debugged a problem with one system down to a flaky drive, which I extracted and took to our sysadmin. Without hesitation, he slammed it down on the floor. "It's not flaky now." The thing is, I knew a lot more than he did about how hard drives work, but he knew a lot more about how vendors work. A flaky drive might be hard to replace. A dead one wouldn't. Lesson learned.

jgalt212 5y ago
My boss at a drug store did the same thing to a moderately damaged case of product X (no longer remember). He dropped it a few times and made sure it was unequivocally damaged and called the vendor.

Inhibit 5y ago

Ours was Western Digital. I worked at a VAR before the turn of the century and there was a rumored clean room problem at WD. We had over a hundred drives that failed but they flat refused to acknowledge the problem. Ended up having to kill the drives on a dedicated rig and send them back to keep our customers from having issues. They knew they were bad but refused to accept them back prior to failure. For a while they were returning a failing drive on the RMA too.

dtmmax33 5y ago

I worked tech support for a large desktop line. This was around 96 and pentium 133 days. We had a large batch of HD's that would fail. Funny thing is, a nice slap on the side of the tower would get them working again. Many times the customer would be satisfied with the solution, but I had to keep them on the line so I could get them a replacement. Can't remember which manufacture the HD's were, but rumor was that a truck broke down in the desert and it degraded the grease inside. So, they would work for a while but then lock up if drive stayed off for a while.

salmo 5y ago

Yep. We had maybe 60 of these. I think 2GB, but can’t remember for sure. We were all Compaq desktops and servers (Toshiba laptops for sales) but much smaller so no clout. We bought some drives to rotate while we waited for RMAs, but the ones we got back failed too, so we just ended up keeping a stack of drives ready to swap. They sat next to the spare dongles for the PCMCIA Ethernet cards, that the sales folks would inevitably break by tilting the laptop on it to get at a piece of paper on their desk. That was a fun time being a small IT shop playing with WinNT and early Linux. We did everything from writing internal apps to running Ethernet. 3 guys in a glorified closet using post-its as our ticketing/user story system. Very IT Crowd.