At 6:47 AM -0700 7/8/99, Chas Williams wrote:
>>This DDRS tends to spin down every now and then "out of the blue".
>>Sometimes I see comments in the syslog, sometimes the machine simply hangs.
>>I cannot tell whether the drive first spins down and up again or whether
>>some rude action from the driver forces the drive into a cold reset.
>
>well... you are not crazy, i have seen this too with some similar ibm drivers
>(some older 1G and 2G models, i forget the model numbers but they were
>definitely ibm)  i really dont suspect the problem is with the ncrscsi
>driver (since i am using a q800/q840/q950, and macos running on a 7100)
>
>i am almost positive this problem is heat related:

An SGI I ran a few years ago had a drive "bug" where if you ran it
continuously the drive would die after about a year.  SGI came out with a
"firmware fix" for the drive which made it periodically spin down and then
back up when the drive thought it was idle.  The theory was that letting
all the lubricant settle to the bottom once in a while kept the spindle
bearing better lubricated on that design than keeping all the lubricant
pasted to the outside surfaces.  I left less than a year after that so I
can't say if it worked.

Don't remember the actual drive brand.  Sorry.

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