SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.