Air conditioners kill hard drives?
We already knew that we had to sacrifice our precious holiday decorations in order to get maximum bandwidth and coverage from our WiFi routers, and now it looks like we may have to sweat out the summer months sans air conditioning if an anecdotal, single-source article in Associated Content proves accurate. According to sole interviewee Ben Carmichel of ESS Data Recovery, his company sees "a 20% increase in failed hard drives hitting our lab in the summer as [opposed to] the winter," and believes from surveying customers and the uptick in electronic-related issues that AC-triggered power surges are largely to blame. Of course, this alleged risk is easy enough to minimize by utilizing an uniterrupted power source for your PC and configuring your drives in a RAID 1 or 5, so it doesn't seem too difficult to have your cake and eat it too in this case. Or you could set up shop in Siberia and just avoid this nonsense altogether.
[Via The Inquirer, thanks John K.]
