I’ve run into a situation at a client’s site. We took over the management of a 5 month old server. The first day we were on site the server failed and after running diagnostics it was determined that the drive failed. I cracked the case and to my surprise the drive that failed was laying on top of another drive that it was duplexed with. The drive was installed without frame rails it was just laying there on top of the other drive. (This server had a drive replaced under warranty by the previous vendor in its 1st week of operation so it’s not a factory goof.) It was so hot you couldn’t touch it. We showed it to the client and now he wants to recover the cost to re-build the OS from the previous vendor. (THE TAPE BACKUP SYSTEM ALSO WAS NOT CONFIGURED OR RUNNING.)
The previous vendor had relied on Windows 2003 to Duplex the drive. We think the drive failed due to heat build-up caused by the improper installation of the drive. What do you think? I?ve seen some postings also that say that these particular ATA drives have had reliability problems when duplexed in a server environment. Could this be the issue?
