Wow, Paul.

Your experience makes for a good case for installing
some externally accesable power supply 'test points'
for monitoring with scope and DVM occasionally to
insure the power supplies are healthy.

... maybe even a good application for a PIC with on board
A/D as well to measure and alarm on faulty DC conditions!

RF Jim



----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Hutchinson" <phutchinson@IMTRA.COM>
To: <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
Sent: Friday, November 01, 2002 12:34 PM
Subject: Re: [OT]: Double HD failure


> I've seen this multiple HDD failure scenario twice in the past four years
> and, heard about one other case a friend encountered 10 years ago.
>
> The first time I encountered this problem was with an fairly expensive DEC
> server. It was covered under warranty and the regular field techs from DEC
> replaced both (very $$$) HDD's quickly. Within a couple weeks both drives
> were dead again, this time the techs replaced the SCSI RAID controller and
> both HDD's with units from a different supplier. Well within a couple more
> weeks the HDD's were dead again. This is when I asked a friend if he'd
ever
> seen a similar problem. He had seen it one time when he worked making
> industrial PC's, it had turned out that the power supply was
intermittently
> surging the 12V lines only. When DEC sent out their senior field tech to
> look at the problem I mentioned the power supply scenario and he thought
it
> was worth a try. With a new power supply and two more HDD's that server
has
> now worked flawlessly for four years.
>
> The next time I saw this problem was just two weeks ago on one of my home
> servers. At first it seemed like I had a normal single drive failure so I
> pulled the dead drive and slapped in a spare but I couldn't get it
> recognized by BIOS. After swapping things around and trying other drives I
> figured out that the other HDD was also partially damaged in that it would
> no longer allow a slave drive to work. Since PC power supplies are less
> expensive than good HDD's I replaced the power supply before installing
any
> new drives.
>
> Paul
>

--
http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body