So yesterday, we had a hard drive fail at work. It was on a mail/web server. The drives in the server were setup in RAID 0. This is a great setup if you want lots of space and speed. If you want reliability, its useless. One drive dies and you lose everything. While this normally wouldn't be that big a deal, I very quickly found out that there were no backups of the cgi scripts I had written for the box. 3-4 months worth of tweaking gone. I was upset to say the least. One of our resident geek-extremes in the Navy here, Eric Sprague, suggest freezing the hard drive. I was skeptical. I did a little research and found the theory behind it. When things get cold, they shrink. (This I knew.) With hard drives, if the bearings shrink, it increases the tolerances, and makes it easier for the drive motor to spin the platters. So, I called work and had them put the drive in a zip lock back, and place it in the freezer in preparation for recovery. When I got to work, I popped the drive in and booted it up. It worked!!! I was able to copy all of the cgi scripts and the entire web page directory off the server before the drive warmed up and died again. It only stayed up for about 3 minutes, but that was enough. Isn't physics awesome !
Powered by ScribeFire.
No comments:
Post a Comment