4/8/2008 at 11:10 p.m. (2 years, 3 months ago)
Came across something interesting yesterday. I had someone call me with 12 out of 20 servers unable to detect their hard drives. I had sold him these servers, and he was calling me for tech support/guidance on the issue. I figured for sure it had to be an overlooked setting since that would be over a 50% failure rate.
Upon arriving at the datacenter, I confirmed his findings. All settings were identical, yet some servers could detect the drives on POST, and some could not. I tried new IDE cables, different settings, and finally swapped a drive sled into another server. The good server couldn't detect the drives either. It almost appeared as if...the drives had gone bad!
After getting a sample of the drives home, I noticed something interesting. Both hard drives in a failed pair had metal shavings peppered all over the PCB on the bottom of the drives. Then I remembered that the owner had drilled some extra holes in the steel cases for ventilation (these server cases were a very poor design). Evidently, there were some shavings left over after the work, and the fans blew them within range of the hard drive's magnetic field. Fortunately, after cleaning the metal shavings with compressed air, the drives POSTed and were able to read and write data.
Case modders take note. If you're going to do metal work, make sure you clean up after yourself.
