Hard drive massacre

For some reason there has been a massacre of hard drives in Phnom Penh recently. Yesterday I replaced three(!!!) hard drives that were failing in the same way. The symptoms?

• No data loss, no errors in error logs, just gradually decreasing performance
• No strange noises, but loooooonnngggg hard drive access times. Minutes of activity where previously there had been less than a second, or maybe two.
• Eventually (just before total death) a notice of a bad sector or two in the event logs.

What caused these three drives to all die with the same symptoms around the same time? Not sure, but I'm guessing that the extremely poor power regulation here could be part of the culprit. Or the massive amounts of dust EVERYWHERE. In any event, if you notice such symptoms on your drives, backup FAST, and not over old backups. I haven't had my clients do an exhaustive check of the data they got off the drives (in only one case was it actually critical) but I'm expecting that what is there is only partially intact.

For the record, ACM Queue has a great article about hard drive failure modes. Check it out if you want to get the gory details on why deaths like this happen. It ain't so uncommon, it seems.

Another iPod, and iTunesU

One of the defining characteristics of geekery is the desire to continuously learn more about one's various passions. From the title, and several of my posts, you might think that I'm an Apple geek. Not so. The iPod for me is mostly (roughly 80%) a tool. A dang cool tool, but it mainly feeds my music geekery. But this weekend that changed.

I've known in the abstract about this thing called iTunesU. I recently got myself a 3rd Gen iPod nano (my wife is taking the 2nd Gen to the US in a few weeks, and I can't be left without, can I?) and decided that it was time for me to check it out. All I can really say is Hot Damn! The computer science departments at MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley have tons of great lectures on there! Some of them are audio, some are video, but all of them are delicious....

Check it out. Really.

Oh, and if you are a fan of good music, where good is defined as "possibly, but probably not, playing on a radio near you" then get yourself a subscription to Paste Magazine. Now. You won't regret it.