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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, 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.