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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: 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.