walking drives
An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they
were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosaur parts carried terrific
angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and
stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to "walk" across a room,
lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a
legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and
jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it!
Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek
across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other
direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce
disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held
disk-drive races.
[Jargon File]
Nearby terms:
wait state « waldo « walk « walking drives »
walk off the end of » wall » wall clock time
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