At the beginning of removing a few hundred hard drives from their static bags I dropped one on a cement floor. I felt soo bad because my boss was helping me and saw it and definitely heard it! He just said look at it, like okay. So I did, gave it to him at the end of installing one machine full of hard drives. He looked it over and just installed it! Push it forward and see what happens I guess!
Now the system goes to testing. I hope everything is fine 😔. I can’t sleep or do much other than think about this one mistake 😖. If it is bad I hope I don’t get fired in this job market. But not much I can do about it until the whole unit is tested in a few days. I hate waiting 😢
TLDR; Dropped a hard drive and my boss saw it and just installed it anyway. Still dreading the unknown.
Comments
Mistakes happen. You should be fine.
It was an accident, they happen. It shouldn’t come back to bite you… if it fails, its an expence and replacement. Just a little paperwork.
If your didn’t freak out, you probably don’t need to either. Drives are tougher than they look – fingers crossed it passes testing.
Not worth firing someone over a couple hundred dollar hard drive. Worst case scenario, that hard drive will need to be replaced.
If it’s an HDD and not an SSD, it’s very likely ruined. Was it a 2.5″ or 3.5″? 2.5’s have a higher chance of not getting fucked when dropped. (Source: I have worked with all kinds of drives, every day for over 20 years)
But, either way. I don’t think you should worry about getting fired. Damage from handling is something that is unavoidable and should be allowed for in the budget. When a business deals with hundreds of fragile, high cost parts every day, there’s going to be some man-made fallout.
If the worst happens and you do get fired over dropping one drive, that’s shitty but is an indication you don’t want to work there long term anyway, if they have a no-tolerance policy for something like that. If you start dropping 3 drives a week, there might be a conversation coming. But, I really wouldn’t worry about this, regardless of whether the drive is broken.
Hard drives are plenty tough, I’m sure it’ll be fine. As long as the drive wasn’t powered up and spinning they are rated to handle a drop of at least 250 times the force of gravity over 2 ms. I forget exactly how to math that but its roughly equivalent to dropping the drive out the window of a multistory building. And if not, then you just did an impromptu Quality Assurance test and its on the testing team to catch the faulty drive (just kidding; don’t actually do this without telling your boss, BTW).
I work in a machine shop and have, in my long career scraped parts worth tens of thousand of dollars. It happens. Mistakes are made. No one is expected never to make a mistake. If you start doing it every month or every week, then your boss might do something. But you handled it correctly. Admitting your mistake and being up front with him. It shows he can trust you.
0.5% fail rate is good for electronics.
Was an ssd? It’s probably okay
Try wiring 240v into a 14v alarm panel and wait for the pop sound when turning on and going of fuck. One hard drive is not the end of the world
Back in about 2002 I thought I could build computers for my company cheaper than buying them. While building one, the attempt to extract the processor out of its clamshell caused it to go airborne and land in the carpet, pin-side down. After carefully straightening the bent pins, popped it into the motherboard and it booted right up, no problem!
Shit happens. Odds are the drive is fine, they’re designed to be dropped, and suffer little to no damage. The heads are parked when they’re off, so they won’t hit the platter and scratch it.
Plus every company has a budget to write off tech equipment – you’re not the first to have dropped something (like a laptop) or spilled tea into a laptop (which I have firsthand experience of), or dropped their company phone or whatever. Things break, who cares.
Roll with it. If the drive is bad, then replace it. If it isn’t, forget about it.
Better than the guy who threw out his hard drive with 8,000BTC then spent a decade digging thru landfills for it
Been in the data center world for 18 years now. 1. It will probably work just fine. 2. Depending on who you work for, it’s a drive. That sucks for sure but a drive is probably the best case scenario if you are going to make a mistake.
I once told a client they could destroy an HDD on leased hardware. I was under the impression that they owned it and I was wrong. I didn’t get in much trouble though. They were more pissed I sent an email saying it was ok so the client didn’t get charged.
Every now and then I look at stats of hard drive failure rates from large data centres. Drive failure is fairly normal. A one time mistake when you are nervous and not in a habit, is probably what your boss is thinking.
If it was a regular occurrence it would be different but I imagine that you looked horrified and they didn’t want you to start overthinking everything
No worries. That’s an official IT proced. Percussive Maintenance.
Hey OP! Don’t be too hard yourself! I paid $400 for a fancy hard drive about 4-5 years ago and DROPPED it on hard concrete before I got it installed. That HDD still runs in my server to this day.
Shit happens, you didn’t pay for it. Show humility and be apologetic (not too apologetic) and it will be okay!
Don’t feel too bad. I once opened a brand new hard drive and watched some static jump from my finger to the terminal. It didn’t boot up.
I put one of my external drives up on a shelf 8 feet high for safe keeping. A few days later, I put something else up they and pushed it over forgetting the drive was up there. It fell 8 ft to the concrete floor. I was hoping that since it was in a case, it would have broken the fall. Nope. It spun up but didn’t sound good and wouldn’t initialize. I shucked, chucked it, and kept the controller. You can plug other drives into the controller like you would with any external enclosure.
I dropped a teacher’s laptop in high school in the 90s. A couple of keys needed to be put back on the keyboard but everything seemed fine. I owned up to it when he got back in the room (and actually waited to put the keys back so as to not cover anything up).
A few weeks later though the hard drive started throwing errors. I knew what caused it, but he knew it was an accident and he still trusted me to do the repairs on machines in the classroom (as did the school tech who was often way too busy – though that person didn’t know I dropped the laptop.
Unless he remembers where it was installed precisely, registered the serial number,
if one failed there’s no way to prove that one out of hundreds was one you dropped,
Don’t sweat it.
Any company that fires you over a new hard drive (with no valuable data on it), probably doesn’t deserve you as an employee. A hard drive is a few hundred bucks and everyone knows mistakes occasionally happen. It costs more than that to replace an employee and that doesn’t even include the down time.