What's the Hardiest Hardware You've Seen? 247
mrsev asks: "I work in a lab and so have lots of strange equipment around me. Recently I found an old 256Mb USB Flash Disk, that I had been looking for 6 months. This would not be amazing but for the fact that it was frozen in a block of ice in one of our -80C freezers (-112F). It must have fallen from my top pocket when I was reaching in. After chiping it out and a quick thaw and dry ... it worked!! All my data was intact and there were no problems. I am now looking for a victim to test in our liquid nitrogen storage facility. My question is what is the strangest hardware survival you have seen."
Microsoft survival (Score:3, Funny)
The shack (Score:5, Funny)
That was one for the record books.
My roomate's XBOX (Score:5, Funny)
My SCSI drive (Score:5, Funny)
You can cook eggs on it while it's running, but it still works.
Old hard drives (Score:4, Funny)
Someone tried to sell us a pretty old computer and when we told them it wasn't worth anything they ask us to trash it. The hard drive in the system was an old MFM 5.5 inch full height drive that had a non-removable cover. We tried to break it open with a hammer and could barely scratch the thing. I swear that you could have thrown the thing out of an airplane and it would surface scan ok.
Another time we had a custom throw their own computer through a wall after Windows locked up on them. The only thing that didn't have any damage was a USR 56k ISA modem. But that was only until we gave the modem back to the customer and he broke it into two piece in the front of our store(I personally think he had issues). It did take him about 5 minutes to crack the thing though....
Floodwaters... (Score:5, Funny)
The next week I had some free time and noticed the box sitting in the corner. I took it out back, turned the hose on it, removed and washed the cpu and memory, took it inside and plugged it in.
They were still using that computer as the fax server when I quit.
Anything Nintendo (Score:5, Funny)
Fire Fire Fire (Score:5, Funny)
Turns out (and I know I've done this many times before without starting any type of fire) I had the ribbon cable in backwards on the floppy drive. When I turned the power on, immediately the power wires started glowing orange and the flames were about a foot high and smoke poured out of the case.
After I pulled the plug, only one segment of the power harness was melted (the part with the small floppy connector), so I cut that out, put the floppy cable in correctly, plugged in the other floppy power lead, and turned it back on.
Shocked the Hell outta me, but the thing still worked, and has been working ever since.
My trusty hammer (Score:5, Funny)
Sure I've had to change the head a couple of times, and also the handle, but aside from that it's as good as new.
Re:The shack (Score:2, Funny)
Sony Discman (Score:4, Funny)
Bernoulli disks, bar none (Score:3, Funny)
I used to leave them in my car for days on end in mid-winter (and this is New England - it gets pretty danged cold here) and use them with no problem. But one time, I had no better alternative to use as an ice scraper, so I used a Bernoulli 90 disk, figuring the disk would be toast afterwards (but hey, it was free, so why not sacrifice it?). So I chipped the ice off my car with it and didn't think twice about it.
The disk worked with no problems at all for years afterwards.
Needless to say, the later Zip and Jaz drives were nowhere near as rugged, but Zip was the most rugged small media format (the drives were fragile, but the disks were pretty tough) you could get easily until flash drives took off the last couple of years. SyQuest disks, OTOH, would die if you looked at them funny.
Re:Fire Fire Fire (Score:3, Funny)
Because then you wouldn't buy their product as often, silly!
Re:Old hard drives (Score:3, Funny)
To segue this back to topic, system #4 was a 286. After I'd had it a few years, I added a 287 (math coprocessor for the youngsters) that I bought used on Usenet.
That 287 turned out to be one chip with a deathwish; for some reason, it ran at about 300 degrees F. (Yes, it would boil drops of water.) The system would shut down after about 10 minutes.
But after I added a makeshift aluminum heatsink, it was fine. And that systems still works. I'll never know why that chip ran that hot, or how it survived.
But the price was a bargain. :-)
p166w/mmx (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Old HD (Score:3, Funny)
I've been doing it all wrong. Let me know how it works out.
My trusty body (Score:3, Funny)
I had to change the head a couple times, but it still works! Can't say much for the looks, but it's almost impossible to move a soul from one body to another and all that.
Only problem is that now all my attempts at humor on slashdot are duds.
indestructible cell phone (Score:2, Funny)
Surviving road damage (Score:1, Funny)
My old roommate's 40M hard drive (Score:2, Funny)
He packs his car up and drives off. As he rounds the first corner, he hears a strange noise, but didn't see anything, so he continues on the three-hour drive back to Austin.
When he arrives, he finds that the hard drive is nowhere to be found. He remembered bringing it out to the car and setting it on roof to load it up. Then he remembered the noise as he turned the corner. So he calls home, his sister walks down the street, and finds the hard drive laying in the gutter where it fell off the roof of his car.
He want back the next week and got it. The alignment of the heads had been b0rked by the fall from his car roof onto concrete at 30mph, so the data was a total loss, but after doing a low-level format, the drive itself was fine and ran for several years.
Re:Powerbook dropped down the stairs (Score:3, Funny)
No, he needs a desktop.
Or an etch-a-sketch.
40 mph auto crash (Score:2, Funny)
Cray (Score:1, Funny)
a gander at a big vector machine (perhaps it was
an SVC 1), but I can't recall. It weighed an
enormous amount (tonnes I guess) and had a very
hardy chassis. My tour guide informed me that it
was designed to survive falling out of an
aircraft during take off or landing.
Poor runway.