[ale] disk drive lubricant

[Dow Hurst]

Greg,
Not so urban legend as an DEC engineer told me, about a decade ago, that 
a SCSI drive can lock up due to returning to room temperature for too 
long.  He explained that the normal running state had the disk drives 
warmed to a normal running temperature.  When a drive wouldn't restart 
after a machine failure that he had fixed, he would try warming the 
drive with a hairdryer and then try restarting the server.  I lived in 
fear of our SGIs being down too long with the drives getting cold!!

I am interested in the lubricant vapor pressure used in disk drives.  If 
you are correct that lubricant can get deposited on the platter surfaces 
and heads during storage, then that is a disk design issue.  There 
should be white papers from manufacturers on that topic available.  I 
wonder if humidity, pressure, and temperature changes of the environment 
where the drives are stored affect the lubricants?  Should they be 
stored under nitrogen in a constant humidity environment.  At that 
point, the durability of tape medium and storage costs should come into 
play.

I think mirrored RAID 5 servers are a wonderful thing.  My personal 
dream is to have two separate servers with multiple times the storage 
capacity of the current amount of data that are mirrored to each other 
with power protection and in separate locations with fat bandwidth 
between them.  Then, the wet part of the dream is a third secret server 
that only I know about in a hidden location that is the ace in the hole.
Dow


Greg Freemyer wrote:
> Are you planning to power-down the drives between uses?
>
> If so, there is NO data or gaurentee on disk drives maintaining data
> with power off.
>
> We do it a lot around here, but we also make a tape backup before we
> put the drives on the shelf.  Personally I think data loss starts to
> happen in the 1 to 2 year range.  I do know some people pull drives
> off the shelf every once and a while just to power them up and give
> the grease, etc. a good workout.
>
> I've even heard a guy one time say there were disk drive preheaters
> that could be used to warm a disk drive (and associated grease etc.)
> up.  Treat that as urban legend.
>
> Greg
>
> On 5/10/06, Allan Metts <ametts2 at mindspring.com> wrote:
>   
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I have several hundred Gigabytes of data that's in my way.  I need to keep it, but I don't need regular access to it.  More data is coming in now that will eventually need the same treatment.
>>
>> So I'm looking for a good solution for off-line data storage.  Here's what I'm looking for:
>>
>> --*-- Rack-mountable
>>
>> --*-- Non-proprietary hardware, no special "backup" software
>>
>> --*-- Supports Linux distributions.  I choose which one.
>>
>> --*-- Uses readily-available and inexpensive IDE drives.
>>
>> --*-- Easy to set up and administer.  We have no time to fiddle with this -- I'm thinking 1) mount the drive, 2) copy the files, 3) unmount the drive, 4) remove and replace the drive.  The machine still needs to work when I pop in an unformatted or unrecognized drive.
>>
>> --*-- Hot-pluggable drives would be nice if it doesn't make things complicated.  I'm willing to power down the machine to swap the drives if need be.
>>
>>
>> I think what I'm looking for is a bare-bones rackable server, with an internal IDE drive to boot Linux, a CD-ROM drive to install Linux, and two removable drive bays that I can dump the data to.
>>
>> Suggestions?  Recommendations?
>>
>>
>> Best Regards,
>>
>> Allan Metts, VP -- Technology & Operations
>> AirSage, Inc.
>> ametts at airsage.com
>> (404) 861-3404
>>
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>> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>>
>>     
>
>
> --
> Greg Freemyer
> The Norcross Group
> Forensics for the 21st Century
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