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so here's a stange story that i'm hoping won't seem so strange after some others make comments in response.
i had a large disk array fail at a job site. no, this was not the same array whose failure indirectly led to the original creation of the travelling terabyte. actually, in truth it didn't "fail" as much as it "failed to initialize"
after much fiddling and farting around with IDE cables, controller cards, etc. i came to believe that the problem lay with one of the drives themselves. (and, might i just note, i absolutely HATE how piss-poor the support is within a win32 environment when it comes to isolating which disk in a system is generating timeout and paging errors. if you have a software array built it becomes all the more exasperating since the system logs treat this logical volume as a single device it seems.)
i began firing up and testing the disks one at a time (pulling the array apart, attaching them to independent ATA/133 controllers, attempting to format, scandisk, and move data around, etc)
within a short while i started hearing the strangest noise i have ever heard... i actually began my quest to suss it out by digging through nearby desk drawers in search of a pager, pocketPC, or travel alarm clock where i assumed some sort of alert was sounding off. it was a sing-songy series of melodic beeps.
eventually, i came to realize it wasn't coming from a nearby desk or bag but from the machine itself. although repeating, the interval was highly varied and this made pinpointing the problem item that much harder. i eliminated the possiblity that it was the PC speaker (by yanking it mid-jingle only to hear the music continue to its conclusion) and the piezo speaker on the array controllers (a thick layer of tape over them and no change in the sound was heard)
eventually i came to find that this "music" was actually coming out of a hard drive! have you ever heard of this? the circuit board doesn't appear to have any speaker devices embedded in it. and while many bits of hardware now sport the ability to generate error beeps, i'd never heard one from a disk nor one in this oddly musical manner.
the whacky musical drive is a 500GB Maxtor (model 6H500R0) and just to prove to everyone that i haven't been mainlining peyote here in my office, i'm going to try to make a sound recording of the chiming beeps and post it somehow.
odd, man... seriously odd.
(btw, the drive is fucked... no longer detecting or properly initializing so it was the culprit indeed... i just wish i had more to go on earlier than incomprehensible musical notes)
i had a large disk array fail at a job site. no, this was not the same array whose failure indirectly led to the original creation of the travelling terabyte. actually, in truth it didn't "fail" as much as it "failed to initialize"
after much fiddling and farting around with IDE cables, controller cards, etc. i came to believe that the problem lay with one of the drives themselves. (and, might i just note, i absolutely HATE how piss-poor the support is within a win32 environment when it comes to isolating which disk in a system is generating timeout and paging errors. if you have a software array built it becomes all the more exasperating since the system logs treat this logical volume as a single device it seems.)
i began firing up and testing the disks one at a time (pulling the array apart, attaching them to independent ATA/133 controllers, attempting to format, scandisk, and move data around, etc)
within a short while i started hearing the strangest noise i have ever heard... i actually began my quest to suss it out by digging through nearby desk drawers in search of a pager, pocketPC, or travel alarm clock where i assumed some sort of alert was sounding off. it was a sing-songy series of melodic beeps.
eventually, i came to realize it wasn't coming from a nearby desk or bag but from the machine itself. although repeating, the interval was highly varied and this made pinpointing the problem item that much harder. i eliminated the possiblity that it was the PC speaker (by yanking it mid-jingle only to hear the music continue to its conclusion) and the piezo speaker on the array controllers (a thick layer of tape over them and no change in the sound was heard)
eventually i came to find that this "music" was actually coming out of a hard drive! have you ever heard of this? the circuit board doesn't appear to have any speaker devices embedded in it. and while many bits of hardware now sport the ability to generate error beeps, i'd never heard one from a disk nor one in this oddly musical manner.
the whacky musical drive is a 500GB Maxtor (model 6H500R0) and just to prove to everyone that i haven't been mainlining peyote here in my office, i'm going to try to make a sound recording of the chiming beeps and post it somehow.
odd, man... seriously odd.
(btw, the drive is fucked... no longer detecting or properly initializing so it was the culprit indeed... i just wish i had more to go on earlier than incomprehensible musical notes)
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