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