conclusion drawn from one data point

[cellio]

When what turns out to be the hard drive starts making that "clunking" sound, you've got about three minutes to rescue what you were working on. (Fortunately, it was the secondary drive that I didn't really care about anyway.)

This is actually my very first personally-witnessed hard-drive failure. I had a drive die once when I wasn't home, and I had one get taken down by a failing power supply and another by a power surge (yes, through the surge protector), but I haven't seen this particular failure mode before.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Did you see the magic smoke escape?

[cellio]

No magic smoke, alas. I was disappointed by the show.

(I suppose it's possible that the IT guy saw smoke. When the knocking started I picked up the phone and told him "I don't know what this means but it can't be good" and he came running over. He had the case open and was trying to determine which drive was doing it, but as soon as he popped the case the noise stopped and half a minute later the machine became non-responsive and we had to use the power button to shut it down. He pulled the secondary drive and all is now well, apparently.)

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

I was doing desktop support and helpdesk duties during the OJ years. For some reason there was a rash of hard drive failures in our equipment at the time.

We had a saying:

When the drive goes clunk,
It's turned to junk.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

I actually had a hard drive survive the building the computer was in burning down around it. The computer was pulled from the wreckage, and I managed to get the hard drive to spin up in another computer. :)

It's no fun when they do die, though.

[siderea]

Ayah. Hard drives should be seen and not heard.