OT: PC expert question

It's clearly possessed. Have you checked CPU temperatures in the BIOS? I'd have a guess at a knackered fan or a fan with something stuck in it.

Nevermind, fixed it - dud hardrive!

Wasn't a Hitachi/IBM Deathstar was it? Normally the the 80 and I think 160gigs were the worst.

Nothing compares to the mighty MTBF of the Maxtor Bigfoot.

IBM Deskstar 61.4Gb :)

Been dead for ages and I'd completely forgot it was in the case until I got the side cover off. Removed the offending item and all the nasty noises have gone!

The Deathstar was famed for going bad at random, and not always after long periods. You just got the click of death. it was what caused IBM to get out of the domestic drive market with that deskstar range and let Hitachi take over the name and business as they made them anyway.

Elder wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.individual.net:

I can remember when we had a whole bunch of them in a mahoosive raid array on a production Sun E10000 Starfire setup. Much fun ensued. Especially when the backup beast had the same. :-)

One weekend, a hosted client where I used to work had their webserver fail on a Saturday, the raided Deathstars failed. As our engineers and my boss worked through the early hours of Sunday morning to get it back online, the NAGIOS alerts kicked in again and they were getting alerts to the mobiles.

The mailserver had failed too (Deathstars again). They went back to the engineering store to discover that they needed 4 drives for the webserver, and 6 for the mailserver and they had two drives. On a sunday morning on one of the few clients with an SLA. Then they couldn't find the backup tapes for later than 6 months old and the customer had a contract for daily backups as they were in the financial industry offering bonded loans and insurance for major businesses who needed money to expand but were considered a risk. The shit really hit the fan there.