Re: dying scsi drive?
"Phil Mendelsohn" <phil@rephil.org> wrote:
>labrahemmo@netscape.net said:
>
>> There is a fare chance that the drive is dead. The drive makes an
>> unhealthy noise when something is read from the disk.
>
>Yes, this is a bad sign.
>
>> It is rather old
>> (date code 9902) and it has been in a server application previously.
>
>That's not a very old date code; I have a lot of old gear, like DEC, SGI,
>Control Data, some SCSI drives ran under heavy use for 15 years, and age
>and uptime doesn't correlate very well with which drives work and which
>don't.
>
>> Lately the box has been in storage (off) for some time. I've understood
>> that the bearings don't fancy that and might get stuck (or something like
>> that).
>
>No, bearings wear out when they're running, not when they're sitting
>still. ;-)
I've understood that the lubricants lose their effect when the drive sits idle for some time...
>But, when you say the drive makes a noise when something is read, I
>presume you mean as opposed to when it's just idling? So, it's not the
>bearings, but either the head actuator (voice coil) or maybe the head
>itself is making divots in the platter.
That makes sence. It does sound like the head is banging the extremes of its range (obviously the beginning of the disk). Interesting part is that it made the sound first time when I wrote the boot sector after the installation of the base system. Before that I changed the partition table and installed tha base system to the disk without any additional noise. Actually, before the problem occurred the drive made a perfectly normal (for its age) sound when active. And the disk spins too. I can hear it slowing down when I cut the power.
At present, the first thing it does is reading the partition table which produces the noise and an error :(
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