On May 2, 16:53, PG Manney wrote:
> The head had gouged its way through the entire thickness of the platter;
>
> Anyone ever seen a worse failure?
Not seen, but heard...
Some time ago, I had a little Seagate 50MB drive on running on the shelf
above a workstation. I knew it had a stiction problem, so I tended to
leave it running most of the time. So there I was, minding my own
business, as they say, and suddenly there was a very loud BANG. I couldn't
see anything amiss, but I shut things down anyway. Then I realised any
damage that was going to be done by whatever went bang had presumably
already happened. I wasn't going to find much out by staring at a blank
screen, so I powered everything up again. All came to life, but the
Seagate just reported disk errors. Tried reformatting; no joy. So I took
it apart. Every platter had huge circular gouges, and two of the heads
were in bits, mostly embedded in the walls of the disk chamber.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
Received on Sat May 02 1998 - 20:36:48 BST