Neowin server hamsters get 'Dugg', suffer heart attack

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We apologize for getting caught with our pants down today, but our friends at Digg and Reddit have been slamming our forum with traffic over the last few hours. Our servers buckled under the pressure, but it's hard to survive the Digg wave, especially when we get a pretty heavy level of traffic on a normal day for our servers. (Our traffic load today is almost twice our daily average, and we've blown away our concurrent user load record away by nearly tripling it.)

Yesterday myself and two of my co-workers took apart an old hard drive that we found in a stack that were being sent off to be destroyed. The drive was an 8GB Quantum Fireball that had a nasty rattle to it. Since we'd never heard anything this bad coming out of a hard drive we decided to open it up and see what was causing it. To our amazement the drive looked like it lived up to its Fireball name.

So here are the photographs you've probably come here looking for. Again, we apologize for the inability to reach the site. Our Developers did their best to get everything back up as quickly as possible.

Fried Hard Drive: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

#1 l33txp on 28 Feb 2008 - 02:40

wow... where was that hard drive??

#2 Netrack on 28 Feb 2008 - 02:46

i saw the article on the digg front page...didnt realize it was for my neowin!

#3 KoDeXeRo on 28 Feb 2008 - 02:46

that's why the servers went crazy

#4 Netrack on 28 Feb 2008 - 02:52

there forums are setting records! There are over 9k members signed in right now!

SHES GONNA BLOW!

(1 reply) #5 +Lewism on 28 Feb 2008 - 02:53

Server too busy.

Poor little hamsters

If this continues, we will have the pictures of a 2nd hard drive

#5.1 Tikitiki on 28 Feb 2008 - 04:03

I just had to lol at that

(1 reply) #6 KoDeXeRo on 28 Feb 2008 - 02:55

holy smack... i posted a thread about it but then saw this one but then someone posted again in it saying it's up to 9000 users!!! It's so weird too, my browser froze when i loaded that page and i had to crash IE. LOL

Damn happened again, whenever i get the board message (server too busy) my IE locks up... LOL

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=622583

That's the thread.

#6.1 OPaul on 28 Feb 2008 - 11:41

(KoDeXeRo said @ #6)

I was having that problem to, browser locking up trying to go to Neowin. Why was the Neowin busy page causing that?....

#7 PatrynXX on 28 Feb 2008 - 02:57

Need a better camera. I'd say if that was the IBM Deskstar I had years ago it'd be glass sand by now. (it already turneed to sand when it did die.) Glass platters do not rock

(1 reply) #8 Commodore Max on 28 Feb 2008 - 03:05

Grilled HDD anyone ? :p
mm mm good !

#8.1 Tha Bloo Monkee on 28 Feb 2008 - 03:09

No thanks, I'm a vegetarian.

#9 rockergrrl on 28 Feb 2008 - 03:11

Looks almost like a hard drive I took apart a couple months ago at work -- it too was set to be thrown away. Bye bye server hard drive.. hello... black dust!

#10 Bawx on 28 Feb 2008 - 03:11

Hell yeah Digg effect on Neowin! NEED MORE MEMBERS.

#11 neufuse on 28 Feb 2008 - 03:23

What the heck

we have hard drives at work, working 24/7/365 non stop reading and writing and that's never happened to us... what the heck was wrong with that drive!

(2 replies) #12 +Berserk87 on 28 Feb 2008 - 03:33

80,000 views :rofl:

#12.1 KoDeXeRo on 28 Feb 2008 - 03:39

yeah, the funny part is that since the link has bbeen redirected here this post got like 17,000 hits already!!

#12.2 Marshalus on 28 Feb 2008 - 03:41

And in between that there was a static page without any kind of counter.

(1 reply) #13 Tikitiki on 28 Feb 2008 - 03:58

Not to undermine any of the devs, but I can provide some suggestions on optimizations. I run a sites with half the # of posts as neowin so I know how hard it is to keep a server up and running especially when you've been hit with the digg effect.

I'm also curious as to how neowin is setup? 2 MySQL servers on a cluster/replication? And 2 Apache nodes on a load balancer?

#13.1 Marshalus on 28 Feb 2008 - 04:37

Pretty much.

We have been switching back and forth between directing traffic to the front page and the forum post to experiment with how much load we can sustain. 11k seems to be about the limit for the forums. The front page code is much lighter and can easily handle the pressure.

We've never had any other period where we could do this before. We have never been slammed on this level before, not at this level, at least not in recent memory.

I am sure the developers will be making adjustments as needed.

#14 thequestor on 28 Feb 2008 - 04:04

That's not fried. Quantum's did that all the time, especially SCSI drives. That is the magnetic coating on the silicon platters coming off. Though never a good thing, it is pretty far from being "burned"

Craig

#15 _Raven_ on 28 Feb 2008 - 04:43

Maybe Neowin and Digg will be on AOTS LOL

(2 replies) #16 Khirzask on 28 Feb 2008 - 04:57

Epic.

#16.1 +Piggy on 28 Feb 2008 - 05:05

Won't someone please think of the Hamsters!

#16.2 P1R4T3 on 28 Feb 2008 - 07:51

Considering the kind of life the hamsters been having, it was bound to happen.

#17 electronixtar on 28 Feb 2008 - 05:09

it's A TRAP

#18 Raptor on 28 Feb 2008 - 05:10

Heh, I have an old Quantum Fireball that died on me due to its pcb board being fried by a bad power supply. It was an 8.4 as well, I believe. I was always tempted to find a replacement I/O board to see if I could resuscitate it. I'm half tempted to ask for the serial # on that

lol.

#19 maudit on 28 Feb 2008 - 05:52

Countdown for termination has begun...

Gotta love & hate digg

Love because it MIGHT bring more knowledgeable users to teh community...
hate.. well them damn hamsters are getting too fat to be DIGGing...

#20 wrack on 28 Feb 2008 - 06:16

Nice job

#21 +lylesback2 on 28 Feb 2008 - 08:09

wow, that is one fried hard drive... I seriously never knew they would over heat and blow up like that

#22 ]SK[ on 28 Feb 2008 - 08:51

The worst ive seen a hard drive. How it worked for as long as it did is beyond me.

#23 linuxamp on 28 Feb 2008 - 09:10

I've seen my share of literally fried drives (usually PCB board burns) but I've never seen heads saw through the platters before. That's insane.

(2 replies) #24 hotdog963al on 28 Feb 2008 - 10:32

Hahaha! I have 4GB Quantum fireball! XD

#24.1 jelli on 28 Feb 2008 - 11:00

Go pull it apart and see what it looks like! Then post pics... maybe warn the staff as well that the hamsters are going to suffer another heart-attack.

#24.2 FusionOpz on 28 Feb 2008 - 14:14

I have a 20GB one in my test box... should I be worried?

(1 reply) #25 arsenalever on 28 Feb 2008 - 12:10

I thought Ive seen the pictures:

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=622101

This happpened (date of thread creation) 2 days ago. And its posted now like its something new and related to Neowin (the OP in that thread said that it happened where he works)

Not flaming, just pointing it out

#25.1 Marshalus on 28 Feb 2008 - 12:57

I was the original poster in that thread, I also posted the front page.

We had to put something on the front page to redirect to because the load on the forums as so intense.

#26 Azmodan on 28 Feb 2008 - 14:17

Pictures of a broken hard drive are going to cause a broken hard drive

#27 Meacham on 28 Feb 2008 - 14:18

I wondered what was happening, it's not the worst HDD burnout I've seen but pretty close. Nice to see you're up and running again though.

#28 Burned on 28 Feb 2008 - 14:46

I am not surprised. I have seen allot of dead Quantum drives when repairing customers computers. That is why I recommend Western Digital or Seagate.

#29 +Corris on 28 Feb 2008 - 18:55

This place runs on Hamsters? I was under the impression it was gerbils.
Oh what a fool I have been! A FOOL!

#30 wessleym on 29 Feb 2008 - 00:51

Please, Michael Stanclift (and the entire rest of the world which tries to sound overly fancy):
"Yesterday myself and two of my co-workers"
should be
"Yesterday two of my co-workers and I"
http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/330...mmar/reflex.htm

#31 Abhishek Kapoor on 02 Mar 2008 - 17:16

By the looks of the picture it looks like the drive somehow got moisture inside which in turn created corrosion. I just wonder if beside the noise it was making if it was capable of actually holding data.

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