whatastruggle.com

In the beginning of March month where the calendar tells us that spring has arrived, Denmark suffered a blizzard. Of course the snowfall came as a big surprise to the Danish people since we do have snow almost every year?! And every year Danes are taken by surprise and have suddenly forgotten how to drive their cars in the snow which results in massive trafic problems everywhere.

The weather in Denmark in general is nothing to be proud of. We have a lovely summer though, which lasts an incredible 3 months or so. The remaining 9 month it is just grey skies, rain, wind (and fire?). I would be surprised if anyone said they moved here because of the weather. And the bad weather always has it’s effect on me resulting in a bout of flu.

In the past weekend the Danish police finally decided to evict the young people at “Ungdomshuset”. The operation was quite dramatic with anti-terror police gaining access to the building via helicopters and bulldozers. The eviction resulted in numerous violent clashes between demonstrators and police all over Copenhagen. This lasted for a few nights with a lot of molotov cocktails, stone throwing, tear-gas, burning cars and sirens. I am quite pleased that I do not live in inner Copenhagen and pity a friend of mine who lives in one of the worst hit areas. In my humble opinion the politicians made a very bad call on this one by using the police to force out the young people. The results at least speak for themselves.

Just a stray thought.. at my old job in an IT department we had maybe about 20 servers running 24/7. Every-so-often a SCSI drive in one of the servers would malfunction. Luckily ofcourse these all ran RAID-5 arrays so no harm done, just call HP support and have a new one delivered. However, I seem to remember that these malfunctions happen quite often, like once every second week. Maybe thats not a lot when you consider 20 server with approximately 5 drives each (100 drives total), but I can’t help wondering why. So I did a little math in my head to calculate the wear on an ordinary 15,000 RPM SCSI harddrive. So here goes..

First of all the 15,000 RPM adds up to 900,000 revolutions per hour which becomes 21,600,000 revelutions per day. In a year with 365 days this becomes 7,884,000,000 revolutions per year. Wow, thats a big number. Just imagine the wear on bearing, motor etc.

If you take the outer most point at the harddrive platter this would be about 1.5″ from the center. This means that the circumference of the circle that this point will describe during a revolution will be 2*Pi*1.5″ which is about 9.42″ or 0.785 feet. Multiplying this with the revolutions per year it means that this point on the harddrive platter will travel 6,188,940,000 feet or 1,172,147.73 miles (1,886,388.91 kilometers).

The distance to the moon is about 238,854 miles, which means that a single SCSI drive could travel back and forth about 4.9 times in a year!