The 75 and ZT Owners Club Forums - View Single Post - Computers need to breath you know, and the dangers of simple static

Keith · 9th December 2006, 22:10

Nothing wrong with using a airline (if dry) on kit, it is where you point it and how far away you hold it that matters.

Dust is a killer and so is Fag smoke as the smoke particles are fine enough to pass through the micro filters that most Hard Disks have this reduces their life significantly.

Static has for years been the cause of all sorts of odd problem including tape drive failures as that is the part of the machine most often "zapped" by users why people still equip their comms room floors with carpet floor tiles beats me.

Years ago when I looked after micro and mini system using CDC drives etc the cost of them meant they gained far better respect. Even when we started replacing them with NCR 286 files servers with 120MB drives in them at £28,000 each they were still looked after

We all assume electronics today are very rugged and usually they are but that is a result of a lot of development work. When I was developing and building high performance power supplies for a flight computer in the Yanks Advanced Tactical Fighter we had the prototypes running in our clean rooms at such high frequencies the boards were susceptible to almost anything, static, passing equipment even the wave of an arm needless to say that was not going to be acceptable during EMC hardening but it was an interesting experiment in packaging.

I was once given a Tornado PDU (Pylon Decoder Unit) to fault find, it had inexplicably dropped a wing tank somewhere over Norfolk this turned out to be static damage to a capacitor

Static damage is a real nasty event often the fault will not occur immediately as the minute carbonised tracking caused by the static can take a while to develop to a component damaging level so in the example above the cap was probably damaged days if not weeks earlier

Today I can install an entire rack or two of Blades and return a few weeks later to find the comms room door propped open or Aircon off because it is noisy or the room used for storage. The mentality today is that they are all just PCs now. and I think failure rates often reflect operating conditions

9th December 2006, 22:10	#6
Keith This is my second home ZT400 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Ellesmere Posts: 5,948 Thanks: 0 Thanked 43 Times in 29 Posts	Nothing wrong with using a airline (if dry) on kit, it is where you point it and how far away you hold it that matters. Dust is a killer and so is Fag smoke as the smoke particles are fine enough to pass through the micro filters that most Hard Disks have this reduces their life significantly. Static has for years been the cause of all sorts of odd problem including tape drive failures as that is the part of the machine most often "zapped" by users why people still equip their comms room floors with carpet floor tiles beats me. Years ago when I looked after micro and mini system using CDC drives etc the cost of them meant they gained far better respect. Even when we started replacing them with NCR 286 files servers with 120MB drives in them at £28,000 each they were still looked after We all assume electronics today are very rugged and usually they are but that is a result of a lot of development work. When I was developing and building high performance power supplies for a flight computer in the Yanks Advanced Tactical Fighter we had the prototypes running in our clean rooms at such high frequencies the boards were susceptible to almost anything, static, passing equipment even the wave of an arm needless to say that was not going to be acceptable during EMC hardening but it was an interesting experiment in packaging. I was once given a Tornado PDU (Pylon Decoder Unit) to fault find, it had inexplicably dropped a wing tank somewhere over Norfolk this turned out to be static damage to a capacitor Static damage is a real nasty event often the fault will not occur immediately as the minute carbonised tracking caused by the static can take a while to develop to a component damaging level so in the example above the cap was probably damaged days if not weeks earlier Today I can install an entire rack or two of Blades and return a few weeks later to find the comms room door propped open or Aircon off because it is noisy or the room used for storage. The mentality today is that they are all just PCs now. and I think failure rates often reflect operating conditions