4 ms·
I used to work for HGST (now absorbed into WD) in the EMEA Enterprise Support lab. My main role was setting up PoC/testing systems, and support for high capacit
by linker3000 5y ago
I used to work for HGST (now absorbed into WD) in the EMEA Enterprise Support lab. My main role was setting up PoC/testing systems, and support for high capacity SAS/helium drives, although I mostly worked with high-capacity flash boards and arrays.
The 15K rpm drives could sometimes be quite noisy; especially with 48 or more in an array.
Three of the engineers with whom I worked specialised in disk failure analysis; one of their tools was an inductive telephone earpiece pickup coil with suction cup, connected to a small amplified speaker. These guys would put the pickup on top of a drive and listen to all the electronics, spindle motor and head-moving voice coil electromagnetic noise as the drive spun up. This process would generally be followed by comments such as: "Hmm, head 4 sounds iffy", "This unit's on older firmware" and "Sounds like the heads aren't coming off the ramp"...
A lost/fading talent now that 2 out of 3 are retired". It was quite amazing to watch and listen to these guys at work.
- xattt 5y agoI believe this sort of acoustic analysis for failure is still used in wind turbines.
- tiernano 5y agoI have 300GB wd velociraptors for many years in one of my machines... going back 10 years, only got replaced last year... probably didn't need to be replaced, one drive out of a raid 0 array died, the other probably still works... but on the note of hearing differences in sounds, back in the day of dial up, since my ISP gave unlimited free dial up minutes, but it had to last no more than 2 hours (it would auto kick you off if you were on for more than 2) my modem would dial every 2 hours... And it got to a stage that I could know, by sound, if it was going to get a 56k link or a 33.6k link...
- xvf22 5y agoI can totally relate, I could also tell the link speed by the noises.
- fibonachos 5y agoWow, this brought back some great memories :)
- CamperBob2 5y agoone of their tools was an inductive telephone earpiece pickup coil with suction cup, connected to a small amplified speaker. Ah, yes, the Mark I Real-Time Fourier Analyzer.