Anthropomorphic Osmosis and the Death of Spinning Rust...

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Kilmatead
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Anthropomorphic Osmosis and the Death of Spinning Rust...

Post by Kilmatead »

I blame Nikos!

He and all his irrational fears! One of my long-trusted internal SATA drives just gave up the ghost last night. Not three days ago CrystalDisk showed it had over 44,000 hours of trusted service, over 3,500 cold-starts, and all of that at 10,000 RPM (it was a high-end drive). Ok, yes, it was 9 years old and I wasn't using it for anything important as I was kind of expecting it to die one day of old age, but I am convinced that storing Nikos' fearful emails on that drive where he continually expressed the trepidation that his own drive was going to fail finally gave it the heebie jeebies and it decided to depart this electronic plane before entropy got the better of it.

The kicker is that I actually have two of those drives bought at exactly the same time (on the theory that one would fail within the first year, as they do), so now I'm kind of nervously eyeing up the other one and contemplating having it replaced before it too gives me an unwelcome surprise.

When I replaced all the other gear on my computer recently, I didn't worry much about the drives on the admittedly groundless idea that if they lasted 9 years in the first place, they could probably last 10. Nope. 9 years and a couple of months seems to be the cut-off point.

Curiously, it didn't give a lot of warning - one second it was there, the next the drive-bar in x2 got a little shorter - managed to resurrect it for a single boot where it reported some garbled faults, allowed me to copy some stuff off it, showed a running-temperature of 71 degrees Celsius (not good) and then poof, gone. Don't let anyone tell you that drives often "give a warning first" - sometimes they really do just drop dead without so much as a whimper.

And I wholeheartedly blame Nikos. :D

(If you think about it... 10,000 rotations per minute, multiplied by 60 minutes, multiplied by 44,000 hours tells me that its bearings didn't owe anybody anything, that's for sure. They just don't make hardware like they used to. Never be tempted by those silly magazine articles which stress the ratio of GB-per-unit-of-currency as a buying-guide. You get what you pay for. So always buy the best. :wink:)
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nikos
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Re: Anthropomorphic Osmosis and the Death of Spinning Rust..

Post by nikos »

(mechanical) death and taxes me lad;)
if you think about it, a high spinning drive is accelerating its own demise. That's why formula 1 cars must be rebuilt after each race. But 9 years is not that bad!
Kilmatead
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Re: Anthropomorphic Osmosis and the Death of Spinning Rust..

Post by Kilmatead »

nikos wrote:if you think about it, a high spinning drive is accelerating its own demise.
The funny thing is, the boffins are getting rather creative with exactly what qualifies as "mechanical" these days... for example, Fluid Dynamic Bearings.

My personal favourite of this (in terms of longevity claims) is a fan which is rated for 300,000 hours (Germans are proud of their engineering, you know). For the mathematically challenged, that's roughly 34 years of continuous use. As it happens, I actually have a couple of these in my system, so we'll see about this... or (since I don't feel like waiting until I'm 82 to debunk their claim), maybe I'll just take their word for it, and instead ponder the curious discrepancy between a product having a 34-year life expectancy and yet a mere 3-year warranty. :shock: Germans may be proud, but apparently they aren't proud enough to let that get in the way of capitalist pursuit.

Whatever happened to Craftsman tools anyway... you get the idea that some over-paid muckety-muck decided to overturn 85 years of lifetime warranties in the name of economic expediency. Bloody typical. :shrug:
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