Hard Disk Drives Could Surprise VARs After Jan. 1

VARs or their clients which plan to power down their systems after January 1 as a part of their final preparations for Y2K might want to think twice about whether they should do so.

According to a report recently circulated by the SANS (System Administration, Networking and Security) Institute, Bethesda, Md., hard disk drives which have run at 24x7 for several years could fail as part of a systems power-down and power-up.

The problem is not related directly to the Y2K bug itself, but could be caused by the simple act of powering down then up such drives, said SANS Institute officials.

According to a contributor to the SANS Institute Y2K warning Web site, hard disk drives which have been running 24x7 for an extended period may have accumulated "grunge" over time. Grunge, which is composed mainly of lubrication by-products and media particulates, can get knocked off the drive's slider when the drive is powered down.

The safe way to power down then up a hard disk drive after years of uninterrupted service is to back up the data, do a short period power-down of a maximum of 30 seconds to clean off the grunge, do a non-destructive storage testing on the disk drive, and then do a real power down, the contributor said. Otherwise, if the disk is powered off for too long, it could be affected by striction, a condition in a hard disk drive wherein grunge causes the head to stick to the disk.

According to Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, such a threat probably affects only older disks.

VARs are mixed as to the possible consequences of this problem, but generally agree it is much likely to affect open systems than mainframes.

It could be an issue for mainframes, but probably will not affect open systems environments, said Derek Gamradt, director of engineering at Vangard Technology, Pleasanton, Calif.

Server-attached storage still accounts for the majority of storage in the field, said Gamradt. Furthermore, clients are constantly upgrading, especially with the latest 18-Gbyte and 36-Gbyte drives.

"Enough servers are downed on a regular basis for maintenance and upgrades," said Gamradt. "In open systems, it's hard to keep systems running all the time."

However, Gamradt did not discount the problem. "The biggest issue is on the mainframe side," he said. "They run huge storage farms."

It is plausible that people have left systems up for a year or two at a time or longer depending on the server, operating system and computing environment, said Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation Computing Inc., a San Diego, Calif., based Compaq VAR.

"VAX systems run forever. . . . In a Windows environment, how many times a day does it crash?" Baldwin asked.

Baldwin agreed with Gamradt that storage-attached storage is still prevalent, reducing the chances of a disk drive having run for years without being powered down by now.

Nth Generation is recommending to its customers they power down their systems as part of the great grand finale test after January 1.

"You can't just change the date," Baldwin said. "That will do the bulk of the testing. . . . But without cycling the power, you don't get to the low-level code. At that level, you can't test a server properly without powering it down."

The Institute is a cooperative research and education organization connecting more than 62,000 system administrators, security professionals and network administrators who share the lessons they have learned and work together on future challenges.

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