One more thing to watch out for at data centers - fire drills

Sat Sep 17 21:43:18 UTC 2016

On 9/17/2016 07:39, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-loud-sound-just-shut-down-a-banks-data-center-for-10-hours?utm_source=bbcfb
>
>  Releasing inert gas from fire suppression units that were over
> pressurized resulted in an extremely loud noise

My experience is only with in-specification systems (and only in tape 
libraries) but those tests were pretty loud.

– causing cabinets
 > full of hard drives to vibrate – which got transmitted to the read –
 > write heads of the drives.

My experiences were back in the days of washing-machine class disc 
drives and they were a 4-hour fire-wall away, but I don't remember them 
being impacted. (I can't believe that I was allowed to conduct a test 
with them running, but I don't remember shutting them down.)

I wonder if orientation mattered--mine were all platters parallel to the 
floor, I wonder if the damaged ones were parallel to the wave front.

> full of hard drives to vibrate – which got transmitted to the read –
> write heads of the drives.
>
> Amazing sort of outage + data loss, and this time the physical
> security plant chief gets to write up the RCA.

-- 
"Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by
its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole
life believing that it is stupid."

--Albert Einstein

 From Larry's Cox account.