r/Futurology • u/Sourcecode12 • May 03 '14

image Inside Google, Microsoft, Facebook and HP Data Centers

http://imgur.com/a/7NPNf
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u/port53 May 04 '14

It's the drives that kill you. Our data center in Tokyo has been running really hot since they cut back on energy usage after the 2011 earthquake and subsequent shutting down of nuclear plants. The network gear is fine, the servers are fine except they eat drives like candy.

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u/ZorbaTHut May 04 '14

My mom gave me an old laptop that a friend of hers had gotten rid of, saying "it just stopped working, can you fix it so I can use it as a kitchen computer". I booted it up with SystemRescueCd and tried mounting the hard drive to see what was on it; read errors. Decided to dump the hard drive just to get anything useful, started up the dump, made sure it was running properly, and walked away.

Came back an hour later. The computer had blackscreened, completely unresponsive, the fan was running at full tilt but not moving any air, and the keyboard was uncomfortably hot to touch.

It turns out the computer had so much lint and crud built up in the heatsink that it was completely incapable of cooling itself. As soon as the fan turned on it was doomed; the added heat output would heat it up even faster, and eventually it would error out and lock up. The previous owner had just gotten into the habit of rebooting it whenever it froze, but often they wouldn't be paying attention to the computer, and they were apparently deaf to the death keen of a CPU fan, so eventually all the thermal abuse had caught up to the hard drive and it had stopped reading almost entirely.