Reply #13: I like that

[sweetheart]

I'm a software/hardware industry professional, who has in past lives
held titles like "Hard drive evaluation engineer, <large computer
manufacturer>". It was a mechanical failure. I believe that it has to
do with power cycling the machine soooo many times.

It was unspoken doctrine, even in your post, that the machines stay
up all the time running.... but the new home user shuts the lights
off when they go to bed, and turns on the computer and off, like
they do the bathroom lights. Though the industry now runs in the
home, it has not adjusted to the reality of home abuse of computers.
Reality, people turn the things off regularly.

When i spoke with the disk recovery people, they said there is a
boom in business from home users who lose hard disks, just like my
situation, and that some drives don't handle regular power cycling
well. As well, they did point out that some drives have limited
life spans.

You can't "disagree" with entropy. All physical systems fail,
eventually. If you powercycled your rack a lot, you'd probably
come to that sooner.

Good that it has not happened to you. I wrote this thread, so
that my friends on DU do not have to endure the painful recovery
costs. And it seems i'm not the only DU'er who's had to have
a drive recovered recently. Agree, disagree, no matter.

I know the old electronic engineers maxim... "check the connectors,
check them again... no CHECK them aaagggaiiin... its always the
connectors." I spent 2 days plugging and unplugging, i even found
another drive of the same make and swapped controllers, hoping it
was a solid state failure... all to no avail... down hard.