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El Reg reports
A chap named Ross, says he "Just switched off our longest running server".
Ross says the box was "Built and brought into service in early 1997" and has "been running 24/7 for 18 years and 10 months".
"In its day, it was a reasonable machine: 200MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 4GB SCSI-2 drive", Ross writes. "And up until recently, it was doing its job fine." Of late, however the "hard drive finally started throwing errors, it was time to retire it before it gave up the ghost!" The drive's a Seagate, for those of looking to avoid drives that can't deliver more than 19 years of error-free operations.
The FreeBSD 2.2.1 box "collected user session (connection) data summaries, held copies of invoices, generated warning messages about data and call usage (rates and actual data against limits), let them do real-time account [inquiries] etc".
[...] All the original code was so tightly bound to the operating system itself, that later versions of the OS would have (and ultimately, did) require substantial rework.
[...] Ross reckons the server lived so long due to "a combination of good quality hardware to start with, conservatively used (not flogging itself to death), a nice environment (temperature around 18C and very stable), nicely conditioned power, no vibration, hardly ever had anyone in the server room".
A fan dedicated to keeping the disk drive cool helped things along, as did regular checks of its filters.
[...] Who made the server? [...] The box was a custom job.
[...] Has one of your servers beaten Ross' long-lived machine?
I'm reminded of the the Novell server that worked flawlessly despite being sealed behind drywall for 4 years.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday January 15 2016, @03:45PM
You couldn't do that now. Last year, I lost half a dozen hard disks, burning through a supply I thought would last me for years. They would literally shake apart and fail almost instantly. They were all Seagate, and I switched to WD, but I don't know if that will help. A gigabyte switch with no moving parts that had been running for years suddenly failed. I had a power supply blow up and fry a motherboard. Two consecutive replacement Gigabyte motherboards were DOA, and I finally got an ASUS one that would work. I've never seen anything like this in my entire life. Stuff is just junk now. I'd pay more for quality, but all the hard disk vendors I used to use like Fujitsu and Maxtor are gone, and Gigabyte was one of the quality mobo brands.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by goodie on Friday January 15 2016, @04:07PM
Interesting, I've actually always had horrible reliability from Fujitsu drives...
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday January 15 2016, @04:36PM
It's always really weird for me to hear stories like this. I normally get at least 5-6 years out of a drive, even nowadays. I retire them early due to capacity before they go bad at this point. I had a 500gb that's about 8 years old that I gave to my brother and to the best of my knowledge, he's still using it. I mean, I HAVE had drives go bad on me. Just not at the rates described here. 2010 and 2011 were the last hard drives I bought, and they're still *happily churning away. It's not that I doubt you, I just haven't seen similar results to what everyone talks about. Maybe I've just been lucky.
* Well, the 2010 (seagate, interestingly) is disturbingly noisy, but periodic sector checks don't show any issues. I'm keeping an eye on it, but if it goes, I'm not losing anything important.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday January 15 2016, @04:49PM
Weird is right. I lost more hard disks last year than I have in my entire life. These drives had a few bad sectors, but then fell apart sometimes in a day or two. All drives have bad sectors, and if the count starts getting high, it's time to replace them, but these drives would go from having a few bad sectors to being unusable in a few days or even hours. I have never seen anything like it. I had several spare drives, and went through half a dozen or so in a few months. They were all Seagate, which I started getting when they bought Maxtor. After that string of bad drives, I switched to WD Black, and have not had a catastrophic failure like this in several months.
In fairness to Seagate, the Seagate drive in the box where the power supply blew up did survive. I actually put it in another box and kept using it a few months, even though it acted flaky.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @05:59PM
A while back, Google did some study of their hard drives, compared with SMART data and whatnot. One of their conclusions was that any drive should be replaced if it reports more than zero reallocated sectors.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @04:51PM
What most people are seeing now is survivor bias.
Most computer equipment seems to have 3 different life strategies.
1) burns out in under a month
2) burns out just after warranty
3) lasts 15 years
3a) retired because it no longer serves purpose
3b) eats itself because of some other issue (usually power)
This has mostly held true for as long as I have messed around with computers. That flooding in the south pacific really did a number on WD and especially Seagates reliability of 1.5/3TB drives. Seagate at one point having a 40% fail rate. It seems right now HGST is where the reliability stats seem to be leaning (1-2%). At least until WD finishes eating them.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday January 15 2016, @05:16PM
I have 400gb Seagate that dates from 2008 or so if the dead (just died over christmas) WD 500gb date beside me is any indication it had the dreaded click of death since I got it still runs fine to this day, oldest I have in use is 160gb Seagate from god knows when still runs in one of my backup servers shows no sign of going titups any time soon.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday January 15 2016, @05:34PM
I used to do end user data recovery at a mom and pop computer shop that had a service department (think geek squad). Standing policy was that if there was a failed drive, we'd ask if they wanted us to attempt recovery, and offered no warranties or guarantee on the drive or the data.
We did some really weird things to help increase chances of recovery. Freezing, replacing the little circuit board on the bottom of the drive. It all depended on what the issue was. Since we had no visibility into the drives, I have no idea what actually worked and what didn't. Eventually we figured out that when a drive was had the clicks, you could sometimes stress it just right (read: rubber mallet taps while running) to keep it going just a little while longer. I wouldn't recommend it, but it did work for us at least a couple times. Note that we only did that after we'd tried everything else, including calling back and offering to send it to a clean room recovery company that we knew of, but weren't directly affiliated with, but no one really wanted to pay their kinds of costs. There were probably at least three or four drives we managed to get usable data from with the mallet.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday January 15 2016, @07:02PM
Never heard of the mallet before except when I got ready to vent some frustration and destroy the mofo, but did do the freezing thing few times. Some times it worked some times not it was the luck of the draw there.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @08:05PM
The associated phenomenon even has a name: Sticktion [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Friday January 15 2016, @07:28PM
I remember doing the drop from chair on to some berber carpet as a last ditch effort to do data recovery. Sometime those shocks are enough to get things loose enough to work for a bit. Sometime is worked but most of the time it didn't. A similar thing can be done with car starters where sometime if you wack them with a screw driver of non marring hammer you can get them to work another couple of times so you can get to the parts store and buy a new one.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @08:26PM
Head Crashes, Firmware corrupting the disk, and thermal failure of the controller boards.
How do I know this? i have had 5 seagate devices in the past ~8 years. Of those 4 are still operating, and of those 3 will get either go offline with errors, or silently corrupt to disk if adequate ventilation/cooling is not applied (Sometimes even if it is, I've had disks running ~42C that exihibited these problems, likely due to heat buildup between the board and the drive casing. Stick a fan blowing between them and all of a sudden the drive works flawlessly.)
That said, I've migrated to all WDs this iteration. HGST actually has a better reputation now, but not enough to offset the price difference between WD Green Desktop drives and the bottom tier HGST drives. As long as you eliminate the idle spindown timeout on the WD Green drives they have excellent reliability and performance.
Maybe in another generation or two I will go back to Seagate when their reputation has improved, but given that similiar issues appear endemic across 2-3 generations of drives, I will be reluctant to buy new ones for a while.
(Score: 2) by J053 on Friday January 15 2016, @10:39PM
I have over 50 2TB or larger drives in operation right now. Over the past 3-4 years, I've had at least 8 WD drives fail - and 1 Seagate. Most of the Seagates are their Barracuda consumer drives, although in the last 2-3 years we've been buying the Constellation series. The WDs have all been "Enterprise" drives. Don't even get me started about Maxtor - 5 or 6 years ago we were buying them by the carton because we had so many failures.
(Score: 3, Informative) by chewbacon on Saturday January 16 2016, @08:09PM
I can say the same. I used to use Seagate exclusively but after the third disk failure in 2 years I backed away. Even when under warranty, the replacement process was a hassle and service sucked. I've been using WD and, other than a drive enclosure short thanks to Icy Dock, have had far less failures.