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Had a similar experience at a previous job. I'd debugged a problem with one system down to a flaky drive, which I extracted and took to our sysadmin. Without hesitation, he slammed it down on the floor.

"It's not flaky now."

The thing is, I knew a lot more than he did about how hard drives work, but he knew a lot more about how vendors work. A flaky drive might be hard to replace. A dead one wouldn't. Lesson learned.

My boss at a drug store did the same thing to a moderately damaged case of product X (no longer remember). He dropped it a few times and made sure it was unequivocally damaged and called the vendor.

I recall a similar experience with a particularly poor-performing $10k+ 3D graphics card for CAD/CAM back in the 90s. It had gone back and forth multiple times for crashing the system, locking up and just plain chugging along relative to the other cards we purchased. The problem was definitely the card, but the vendor claimed there was nothing wrong. Every time it was sent back to us there were more wire traces added to the card and other rework done with no explanation.

After running a pair of probes hooked up to 110vac along the fingers of the VESA bus connection on the video card (and a few microprocessor chips exploded), the scorch marks were cleaned up and it was sent back one more time. We finally did get a new card that worked perfectly along with a long, vaguely threatening letter.

Sometimes the clearest path is through the mud.

I'm not familiar with data center tools or terminology. What is a tazer in this context?

IIUC the same as in other contexts, the subtext being that in face of their refusal to replace these doomed HDs before a failure has registered, the failures were made to prematurely happen with a gentle stream of electrons.

Correct.

To the other comments. We where a good customer that experienced an amazing stupidly high failure rate in a part that others also reported the same issue. The cost of deploying these systems and having them fail randomly broke planning and wasted the teams time and impacted our IT cost metrics. The cost of the support ticket, time and replacing and re-imaging a system was not free. We of course tried very hard to be preemptive in sorting this once we ID’ the issue. The vendor did not care, so another path was taken in order to help express our unhappiness to the vendor which resolve the issue. We paid additional money by paying for a brand name vs for white box with the idea that we would prevent this type of failure.

I mean at first it sounded like fraud, but then you explained it, and then it really sounded like fraud.

Nah, it's fair.

We've had to fry our failed HDDs because otherwise the vendor would replace them with those we've returned previously. Then they would not endure RAID rebuild and the cycle would repeat.

The fraud is theirs.

But you're supposed to hide the murder weapon.

Not keeping track of serial numbers?

Refurbished drives get their firmware and NVRAM overwritten. The subsequent units have different serial numbers and the labels get replaced.

Wow this is full dishonest if they are not marked as refurbished.

No, they do get marked as refurbished. That's why the serial numbers are different.

My original thought was they were threatening violence to the tech that came out

That was definitely my read. "Show them the instruments. That will elicit a confession!"

Fraud requires that there is some financial benefit to gain that you are not entitled to

It's still shockingly wrong.

That's pretty punny.

Never did I consider that puns could be turned against me as well.

IANAL but wikipedia says that you just need some sort of gain, not necessarily financial benefit. Warranty service entitles you to replacement only if it's broken, not when you feel like it. In that aspect you are gaining, since you're potentially getting a replacement you're not entitled to.

Read same and could not believe that author is calling them selves "good customer" and meantime also intentionally failing hard drives with teaser. Some mental gymnastics there ;)

It is an amusing story from a completely different time and place in IT. Today people would just loudly and publicly complain on Twitter and other social media to embarrass the vendor into sorting it. Sharing a story, not speaking to the nature or the correctness of the solution. I have worked on both sides. Once when I was on the vendor side a very large customer returned a very expensive switch as RMA. A set of 16 ports stopped working. The cause in the end, the customer had gotten an SFP stuck and tried to rip it out, pulling the cage from its solder joints on the board. 3 switches in 2 months. We smiled, swapped all of them and then the sales team had a chat with the customer to help resolve the issue (their 3rd party SFP with a crappy designed latch). Is what it is.

My understanding is that having crappy latch design is incomparable to intentionally frying hard drives with taser.

Sibling comments have answered this correctly, but I like to imagine it was there as a threat to the Compaq visitors, like one might leave a loaded gun in a visible spot to facilitate negotiation.

In these parts we threaten to withhold biscuits from meetings. Sometimes we really mean it. Escalating straight to firearms sounds a little bit excessive.

Are you in England?

Yes, towards the bottom left of it.

Tasers aren’t really firearms. Also I’m guessing this was more of a stun gun anyway.

On the weapon scale, taser is a lot closer to gun than biscuit.

I am impressed that your weapon scale goes all the way to biscuit! I guess a stale one could serve as a projectile

England invented rock cakes (see: Harry Potter) and ginger nuts ('the original biscuits in the 1840s were "as hard as a nut"').

Although the USA can fight back with a slow HFCS poisoning :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_cake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_snap

You don't throw them. It's the threat of having to drink your tea (yes, coffee too) without a biccy that does the damage. Withholding tea is unthinkable.

I could tell by your accent ;)

BOFH and PFY tactics :)

Good reference. My first coding teacher made us read all the early BOFH stories while learning Unix and Java. Really brought that shit to life, thanks Jonathan.

I would assume it had a purpose similar to an EtherKiller [0]. Most experienced Shop techs have at least a couple of similar tools to assist with recalcitrant RMA departments.

Unless it's a Creative labs product. You'll never RMA one of those. Ever.

[0] - http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/

Hmm connecting directly to 110V is both dangerous as not limited in amperage (except by the fuse which is way too high for this purpose) and in some cases not enough (e.g. some ethernet has 1.5kV protection)

It would be better to slowly raise the voltage until it blows, leading to minimal pyrotechnics on the components (smoke/burning)

In the early 2000s I 'successfully' RMAd a Creative Labs Nomad Muvo MP3 player. The replacement was a different color, capacity, and had someone else's music on it.

Ours was Western Digital. I worked at a VAR before the turn of the century and there was a rumored clean room problem at WD. We had over a hundred drives that failed but they flat refused to acknowledge the problem.

Ended up having to kill the drives on a dedicated rig and send them back to keep our customers from having issues. They knew they were bad but refused to accept them back prior to failure. For a while they were returning a failing drive on the RMA too.

Yep. We had maybe 60 of these. I think 2GB, but can’t remember for sure. We were all Compaq desktops and servers (Toshiba laptops for sales) but much smaller so no clout.

We bought some drives to rotate while we waited for RMAs, but the ones we got back failed too, so we just ended up keeping a stack of drives ready to swap.

They sat next to the spare dongles for the PCMCIA Ethernet cards, that the sales folks would inevitably break by tilting the laptop on it to get at a piece of paper on their desk.

That was a fun time being a small IT shop playing with WinNT and early Linux. We did everything from writing internal apps to running Ethernet.

3 guys in a glorified closet using post-its as our ticketing/user story system. Very IT Crowd.

Were they Fireball SE maybe? http://www.redhill.net.au/d/74.php

"In the case of the Fireball SE, the mounting of the [power] socket was so flimsy that it was all too easy to break the PCB and thus ruin the drive. (With most other drives, you would have to be a gorilla and a drunken one at that.)"

I worked tech support for a large desktop line. This was around 96 and pentium 133 days. We had a large batch of HD's that would fail. Funny thing is, a nice slap on the side of the tower would get them working again. Many times the customer would be satisfied with the solution, but I had to keep them on the line so I could get them a replacement. Can't remember which manufacture the HD's were, but rumor was that a truck broke down in the desert and it degraded the grease inside. So, they would work for a while but then lock up if drive stayed off for a while.

I remember a time when Compaq used the Quantum Bigfoot (5.25" harddrive) in their workstations. They were noisy and slow. They were also mounted upside down. The failure rate was very high.

Ahh, the Quantum Bigfoot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot

A massive drive. I worked in computer retail at the time, and I lost count of how many customers brought their Compaq Presarios in, DOA, and one of those drives inside.

We'd sell them a new hard drive off the shelf, install it and send them on their way (they were out of warranty, of course).