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I have a theory that solar flares are the cause of some hard drive failures would be interesting to see if a few lead shielded cases would reduce the number of
by DavidD 4y ago
I have a theory that solar flares are the cause of some hard drive failures would be interesting to see if a few lead shielded cases would reduce the number of failures. I used to manage a large fleet of computers and anytime we got radio interference from solar flares we would have 3-5 hard drive failures that day.
- lazide 4y agoOut of what fleet size?
- DavidD 4y agoAround a 1000
- rom-antics 4y agoWhat were the failure modes? Was it corrupted data or were the drives permanently fried?
- DavidD 4y agoCorrupt data that would compromise the Operating systems, these were Dell computers with multiple different branded hard drives they would have us run their hardware diagnostic tool that would put them in the range to receive a free replacements. We didn't have to send back the old ones under the contract we had with them they would still work when reformatted but were less reliable after that.
- GTP 4y agoSo far I always assumed that, when talking about HDDs failing rates, they where considering the typical mechanical failure. I never considered that they could declare a failure due to some corrupted data, although it would be reasonable for a datacenter to do so.
- DavidD 4y agoMechanical failures were more prevalent in my experience in 90s, most of the recent stuff is usually see are controller failures. I rarely hear any head crash clicking like the old days
- maccam94 4y agoIf you didn't disable the write cache on those drives, flares could have caused bit flips in the cache memory before it was flushed to disk.
- dekhn 4y agoAny sufficiently large cluster is effectively a cosmic ray detector with terrible sensitivity.