> Read a while ago that the RAF had to pay compensation to almost a hundred
> car owners - one of their air-defense "steerable-array" radars went 
> haywire
> and scanned over a road - they burned out almost every vehicle's ignition
> and fuel injection microprocessors with the radar beam!

Haha LOL, although not so LOL if it was your car.

> The point being an old, mechanical vehicle ignition system (carburettors, 
> a
> rotor and points) would have just driven on with no problems.

I think that's quite a specialised failure mechanism :-)  I suspect the 
point with the ignition system is that for the same amount of money you can 
make a much more reliable electrical one than purely mechanical, given how a 
car will typically be used (ie not driving in front of an uber powerful 
radar).

BTW, I wonder if the police could have a portable version of such a radar, 
which they could use to stop cars...

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Jim Henderson schrieb:

> See my anecdotal evidence in reply to Stefan.  Two identical units, one 
> powered on and off regularly, one that was left on 24x7.  Guess which one 
> failed?  Not the one that has been turned on and off regularly for 5 
> years now.  The one that was plugged in and running for 3 years solid.

I wouldn't be too much surprised if HDD manufacturers would know ways 
how to optimize drives for one usage pattern or the other, so that maybe 
indeed powering up and down might kill a server HDD quickly, while 24x7 
usage might shorten the life of an office computer / consumer HDD.

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Stefan Viljoen wrote:

> Read a while ago that the RAF had to pay compensation to almost a hundred
> car owners - one of their air-defense "steerable-array" radars went haywire
> and scanned over a road - they burned out almost every vehicle's ignition
> and fuel injection microprocessors with the radar beam!
> 
> The point being an old, mechanical vehicle ignition system (carburettors, a
> rotor and points) would have just driven on with no problems.
> 
> Viz a viz mechanical against electrical failures... 

It always amuses me how film writers seem to think that turning an 
electronic device off makes it immune to an EMP... I thought the idea 
was that an EMP will physically fry the thing like a microwave oven 
fries CDs. :-P

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Invisible schrieb:

>> As for myself, I've never had much luck with optical media.  Trust 
>> them way less than hard drives.
> 
> Depends. We have a batch of archive CDs which have all gone unreadable. 
> We have other, much older CDs (like ten years older) which are still 
> readable to this day. Seems to depend on how cheap the disks are.

I must say that I wouldn't trust optical media any further than I can 
throw them (which, of course, /can/ be quite far, but only in 
non-turbulent air and if you know how... and if you're not out with a 
dog who likes to play fetch...)

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Stefan Viljoen schrieb:
> 
> In the olden days on the Apple ][ with CP/M I had three - the grandfather,
> father and son (and holy ghost! :) - I still remember the stomach churning
> dread of those horribly loud floppy drives grinding and grinding and
> then "BDOS ERROR" on the monochrome green-screen... Those were the days!

That reminds me of those Iomega "jaz" drives that were all the rage 10 
years ago. We had two or three "pools" (12 computers each) equipped with 
those where I was studying back then, which were intended for the 
Multimedia students to store their many hundreds of Megs on.

They seemed pretty fancy stuff - until it turned out that they could 
contract a contagious disease, some hardware defect that would cause 
them to screw up the storage media in just the right way to ruin the 
next drive they'd be put into in just the same way...

Praise be to the inventor of the floppy disc that we didn't see /that/ 
in the days of the 3.5"-HD FDD!

>> If it's not...I dunno.  Data recovery places are expensive, and I don't
>> know if I can justify $1000+ even on the ~year's worth of data I had, at
>> the moment.  How time-critical are these kinds of things?  Can I just
>> keep it and when I have more money in a few months send it to a data
>> recovery place, if I can't get it working myself?
> 
> Not sure, but I think the quicker you do it the better the results you might
> get? 

I guess it depends. If the original fault would be a broken airseal, 
you'd probably want to get the data out ASAP, before dirt can accumulate.

If the thing is still airtight, I don't think it makes any difference 
whatsoever. In their all-metal casings, HDDs can keep their data for 
quite a long time, and their only worthy adversary is particulate matter 
of any size.

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Invisible schrieb:

> Typically an external enclosure contains some kind of controller to 
> convert from IDE/SATA/whatever to USB. This is a non-trivial piece of 
> electronics, and it's not inconceivable that it could break.
> 
> Seems kinda unlikely though...

Heh - believe it or not, but somme colleague of mine actually managed to 
screw up a USB /stick/ just by accidently dropping it.

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clipka wrote:

> Heh - believe it or not, but somme colleague of mine actually managed to 
> screw up a USB /stick/ just by accidently dropping it.

You may recall that one of our BD people managed to damage a USB stick 
somehow. When I did a block-level copy, I found that the first several 
dozen blocks contained only zeros. I have *no idea* what the hell she 
did to that thing... She's pretty ditzy though.

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Invisible schrieb:

> I haven't seen any data about the reliability of SSD vs HD. Bare in mind 
> that flash RAM has a theoretically limited number of write cycles.

I once read an article about that. Quintessence was that with a properly 
  designed SSD, that does sophisticated "load balancing" of write cycles 
across its memory blocks, it would take several /years/ of writing at 
the maximum transfer rate to come anywhere close to the current limits...

And as storage capacity increases, so does the time it takes to screw up 
any one block of a write-cycle-balancing SSD.

One caveat though, at least theoretically, is that the lifetime will 
probably depend on how much data you store on the SSD. For instance, a 
maxed-out drive doesn't have many spare blocks to balance write loads 
on, so it might become technically possible to screw up a block by 
repeatedly overwriting the same portion of a single file while leaving 
all the other files unchanged.

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On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:52:54 -0500, Tim Cook wrote:

> You mean TB, mayhaps?

Yeah, that's what I meant.  Hey, it was 2:24 AM here when I posted 
that. ;-)

Jim

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Invisible schrieb:

> Personally, I'd probably use SSD for my system partition (for the faster 
> booting) and use cheap spinning disk for my POV-Ray renders. ;-)

How much storage capacity do you need for a Linux system partition?

They fit /entire/ Linux installations on a single CD, so...

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