[lug] Drive failure signs was Hard Drive Manufacturer Suggestion

[Nate Duehr]

Mike Stanczyk wrote:

>With everyone sharing their hard drive horror stories and since
>I've lost a drive this month too, I wanted ask what symtoms
>people saw before their drive went to silcon heaven...
>
>Strange sounds?
>Error messages in which system log?
>Strange smells?
>
>Mike
>  
>
It started singing "Moon River" one evening.  Was real eerie to hear 
that coming from the server in the basement.  ;-)

Seriously though, usually on the ones I've had go, the died in one of 
two ways:
- Bearings started "screaming" while spinning, eventually the disk 
didn't spin up or overheated and died.
- Server/system is power-cycled and the drive dies during the power 
event and is forever dead.

The first scenario (not the singing!) is easy to spot, and gives plenty 
of time to double check those backups you've of course already made... 
(snicker...)... or panic and back up the disc.  I usually pre-emptively 
pull these noisy drives also, but I have a couple with non-sensitive 
data on them that's backed up that have screamed along for years 
(Seagate drives).  Noisy little beasts.  One of them is in an old Sun 
Ultra 1 I goof around with.

The second scenario is deadly if there aren't backups.  In extreme cases 
you could probably pay a data recovery service if you absolutely needed 
something off that drive... the electronics died, but the data's 
probably still fine on the platter(s).

Nate