"It's not flaky now."
The thing is, I knew a lot more than he did about how hard drives work, but he knew a lot more about how vendors work. A flaky drive might be hard to replace. A dead one wouldn't. Lesson learned.
After running a pair of probes hooked up to 110vac along the fingers of the VESA bus connection on the video card (and a few microprocessor chips exploded), the scorch marks were cleaned up and it was sent back one more time. We finally did get a new card that worked perfectly along with a long, vaguely threatening letter.
Sometimes the clearest path is through the mud.
To the other comments. We where a good customer that experienced an amazing stupidly high failure rate in a part that others also reported the same issue. The cost of deploying these systems and having them fail randomly broke planning and wasted the teams time and impacted our IT cost metrics. The cost of the support ticket, time and replacing and re-imaging a system was not free. We of course tried very hard to be preemptive in sorting this once we ID’ the issue. The vendor did not care, so another path was taken in order to help express our unhappiness to the vendor which resolve the issue. We paid additional money by paying for a brand name vs for white box with the idea that we would prevent this type of failure.
We've had to fry our failed HDDs because otherwise the vendor would replace them with those we've returned previously. Then they would not endure RAID rebuild and the cycle would repeat.
But you're supposed to hide the murder weapon.
Unless it's a Creative labs product. You'll never RMA one of those. Ever.
It would be better to slowly raise the voltage until it blows, leading to minimal pyrotechnics on the components (smoke/burning)
Although the USA can fight back with a slow HFCS poisoning :-)
Ended up having to kill the drives on a dedicated rig and send them back to keep our customers from having issues. They knew they were bad but refused to accept them back prior to failure. For a while they were returning a failing drive on the RMA too.
We bought some drives to rotate while we waited for RMAs, but the ones we got back failed too, so we just ended up keeping a stack of drives ready to swap.
They sat next to the spare dongles for the PCMCIA Ethernet cards, that the sales folks would inevitably break by tilting the laptop on it to get at a piece of paper on their desk.
That was a fun time being a small IT shop playing with WinNT and early Linux. We did everything from writing internal apps to running Ethernet.
3 guys in a glorified closet using post-its as our ticketing/user story system. Very IT Crowd.
"In the case of the Fireball SE, the mounting of the [power] socket was so flimsy that it was all too easy to break the PCB and thus ruin the drive. (With most other drives, you would have to be a gorilla and a drunken one at that.)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot
A massive drive. I worked in computer retail at the time, and I lost count of how many customers brought their Compaq Presarios in, DOA, and one of those drives inside.
We'd sell them a new hard drive off the shelf, install it and send them on their way (they were out of warranty, of course).