2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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walking drives
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when
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they were huge, clunky washing machine s. Those old dinosaur parts carried
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terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn
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bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to walk
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across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at
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a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to
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the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the
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wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain
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patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk,
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followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time
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hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this
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to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
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