[tke248]

I have a theory that solar flares are the cause of some hard drive failures would be interesting to see if a few lead shielded cases would reduce the number of failures. I used to manage a large fleet of computers and anytime we got radio interference from solar flares we would have 3-5 hard drive failures that day.

[dekhn]

Any sufficiently large cluster is effectively a cosmic ray detector with terrible sensitivity.

[rom-antics]

What were the failure modes? Was it corrupted data or were the drives permanently fried?

[tke248]

Corrupt data that would compromise the Operating systems, these were Dell computers with multiple different branded hard drives they would have us run their hardware diagnostic tool that would put them in the range to receive a free replacements. We didn't have to send back the old ones under the contract we had with them they would still work when reformatted but were less reliable after that.

[lazide]

Out of what fleet size?

[tke248]

Around a 1000