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I remember those IBM Deathstar drives...

Was at the Aussie Tribes 2 launch LAN and there was a guy who had one die on him.

At that time in the LAN scene there would always be someone who had a Deskstar die ... You could hear the clicking over the noise of the LAN.

I realised back then, I can only trust Seagate.

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The memory of the Deathstar drives that stands out most in my mind was a coworker managing to destroy hardware with SQL. We were at a really ... frugal ... interactive advertising firm and our dev server had been slapped together with a RAID-1 array of cheap IBM drives. One day said coworker was testing conversion of a large database table in MySQL from MyISAM to InnoDB format (to see how long it'd take, what query perf afterwards was like, etc.) and all of a sudden the server went hard down. We went over to the server closet and discovered that the IO had been enough for both drives to grenade themselves at the same time. Good times. I'm just glad we had semi-decent backups and it wasn't a production machine.

Hah, I had a Deathstar die on me back in the early 00s too. Surprisingly, about a decade later I hammered it with ddrescue and was able to get almost all the data off it!

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