(Nice job, seriously)

West EU here, bought a new, architecturally wrong (yikes) house in 2012. I knew its conception would spell trouble, and sadly I was not disappointed on this part almost right off the bat. But the location and the price (right on the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and economical fallout / market bottom) were good.

After 14 years it cost an average of $130 per month on maintenance, mainly to correct on multiple occasion the conception issues aformentioned after the 10y warranty. Utilities are about $170 per month. And taxes are now about $1700 per year (rise 3-4% every year)

This $250k purchase must have cost less than $2k in fees, the credit was... well no credit. Spent almost 100% of my savings except some cash for my business. On the overall this house cost me less than $500 per month so far. Not really surprising for a new house, certainly.

And its market value rose by 60% in 14 years.

Yep, ownership is (was ?) very profitable in the west EU, mind the location.

SATA disk are indeed generally more predictable failure-wise. Most issues are related to a failing head stack assembly. Rarely platter demagnetization for some disks (Toshiba laptop).

Other failure issues are usually related to a friggin' manufactured firmware issue from Dell, HP or Lenovo corp.

Disk errors logged in the system event log are from the I/O layer, low-level class driver (msahci.sys) / filter drivers. See Windows Storage Driver Architecture : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/s...

A disk error of this type showing in the event log must immediately be treated as an actual disk issue. This is a low level issue below the actual filesystem and application/services. Seems here the .mdf/ldf of your SQL database used one or more bad sectors on the disk surface.

Your disk seems to be only one on the system, so the first thing to do is check SMART status, for example with Crystaldiskinfo (the most used and user-friendly free portable windows software).

It would very probably have shown a warning state for the internal disk, with probably one or more (judging the quantity of disk error entries in your log) for Attribute C5 "Current Pending sectors" and probably some in Att 05 - "Reallocated sectors count" and/or Att C4 - "Realloc event Count".

Second thing to do is trying to backup your data as fast as possible. In your case related to a Ms SQL database, trying to dump it / backup first was the good move. Sadly (DR pro experience here), weak surface / failing Head Stack Assembly of a traditionnal HDD from most vendors has more difficulties reading correctly a sector than writing it.

If the dump/backup fails, the second choice would have be to try to a sector-to-sector dump approach of the whole disk, with either a online (from OS) software capable of reading sectors from the boot disk (didn't try if HDD Raw Copy Tool 2.6 supports it), or an offline solution like Clonezilla, Acronis True Image, Aomei backupper, etc. But offline solution means offline computer and service...

I didn't exactly understood if you had an actual backup of the data or an image of the whole disk. Considering the critical usage of this station, you should have both running : daily data backup or more + up-to-date disk image ready. whatever the type of disk (HDD/SSD). And a spare, identical computer.

As for repair of HDDs "weak sectors" (meaning Current Pending Sectors), it is indeed possible, often with complete data recovery. If not, the sector will be left as is, or may be remapped if written to 0 (it will then shift from Current pending to realloc sector count).

Hard disk Sentinel Pro as such features (Disk repair, Quick Fix), it works quite well. The result vary greatly from one type of failure to another, as from one disk maker to another.

Note that if the SMART shows more than a little dozen of sectors, the head (amp/preamp) is probably failing, making weaker magnetically-wise sectors too difficult to read and/or write. In this case, the count of current and remapped increases every repair/check pass made by the tools. In this case, the drive is toast and must be replaced ASAP.

SSD are a complete different case for repair.

A older autonomous tool, Spinrite, was specialized for this usage (accurate recovery of data), but veeeeery slow.

RAID pertinence : fortunately, it is an expecteed case as most SATA disks are prone to HSA failure before not initialyzing at all. A RAID 1 mirror would have protected you from a mirrored defect accross the two disks.

The RAID controller (true hardware controller like LSI/Avago or Microsemi) or even fake raid like Intel RST / VROC maintain data integrity accross the array's disks. The defective disk will raise bad blocks (that will get marked in metadata of the Raid Volume), but the others disks are fine and the data can be read safely. If too many errors are reported on a disk (very few in fact on most controllers), it will be labelled as failed and taken down from the array.

Quite a perfect neutralization scheme in this "hunt for self-actualisation".

That's why the display of commitment shown in this thread hurts.

Or even worse : Maxio

Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM.

Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.

The MX500 1st gen (fw M3CR023) was the second best SATA SSD range with the kings the Samsung 860 Evo and Pro. P3 and P3+ were very good drives with great princing for some time, not comparable to the Samsung 970 Evo and Evo+ though.

Never had a failure on about 500 units of crucial MX300/500/P1/P3/P3+/P5. Always updated their firmwares, though.

Comparatively, had lot of sluggish controllers on Sandisk/WD green/blue SATA SSD, and some BX500. But a lot better than any entry level generic Phison S3111 based SSD.

Also very few failures with DDR3/4 DIMMs and SODIMMs. Less than with Kinston and Corsair modules. About the same as Samsung OEM modules from HP/Dell.

Now let's just hope Samsung will not follow in their tracks. I don't see WD-Sandisk going corporate only since they do not make DRAMs modules.

Have seen hundred of chinese ones fail. More than half failed between 1 and 3 years.

As stated by others, issues are mainly and very commonly with the power stage / power management of the mainboard. Also, soldering quality issues leading to failures.

Far less issues with good brands like Dell and HP (had a few hundred of desktop mini g2/3/4). Even tinys from Lenovo do perform quite well compared to their entry level laptops (also quite bad). Industrial computers form factor are also generally quite good but quite expensive, even second hand ones.

Currently don't have enough feddback on the Asus ones nor enough volume to draw conclusions, but so far they performed well with minimal issue, even with models back from i3/i5 8th gen series.

To really wreak havoc, play a bit with Intel Dynamic Platform & Thermal Framework Chipset Participant on 6th/7th gen CPU, by installing optional drivers updates pushed by Windows 10's WU on many laptops (like HP's probook).

Expect miracles... and a lot of BSOD :]

Nice system, had a good memory from it performance-wise. MySQL was not a serious competitor at that time.

The machine had often overheating issues starting from the beginning of june when ambiant temp rose above 24/25°. We did not have CVAC in the building.

If you're security concerned, the OS stack is quite a... secondary issue to you.

You will have to consider switching to an open RISC architecture (Risc-V someone ? Strangely enough or not, EU seems quite fan of this on-the-rise-again architecture) AND a linux distribution.

For sure, for sensitive applications, having a cheap, secure and versatile architecture would be better than making DSPs or issuing hardly scalable and pricy FPGA solutions (well, lots of communication equipements' mainboards still uses them)

Patient : Miniscribe 8425SA 20 MB SCSI hard disk from an Apple Hard Disk 20SC (external SCSI enclosure with a HDD). Hoped the disk was still in working condition after more than a decade stored (HDD was built in '88 and a sticker mentioned a repair in '99), the enclosure power supply was presumed dead (no power on) and the mac itself was shorting mains power in a few little minutes, probably from the screen high voltage converter dying and shorting.

I simply extracted the hard disk from the enclosure. This full height 3.5" disk has an "external" mechanical actuator : a stepper motor visible from outside drives the arm with the head(s) inside the disk, protected by a bellows. It gives a cool sort of a floppy drive sound when random access occurs.

I simply plugged it on a SCSI chain on my vintage Advansys SCSI PCI Card and ribbons.

Read the HFS partition with an old recovery software I could find on the recovery computer, quickly found the files (very simple file system and hierarchy), recovered them on the PC. Encountered just one bad sector.

Then looked the content of the file as raw shaking and ajusted the recovered text format for use with Windows PC/Word from the old word processor software - I think they were Corel Wordperfect files.

Very few correction to make to the raw text. Layout will have to be more thoroughly restored beyond EOL. Mainly accented characters and a few other replacements to do. I thought it would be more of an chore from an vintage apple system and third party software.

Overall, it was far easier than expected. Took me less than 2 hours. But am a ex data recovery guy with some ressources.

Quite pleased the miniscribe acted almost like a charm after 10 years or so of (warm, indoor) storage and not a single power on. Feared the HDD motor's ball bearing were totaly stuck !

A lot of BSOD were also caused by generic and low quality DRAM sticks, unstable individually (failed addresses) or becoming unstable when paired in dual channel setup, especially with 2 pairs of dual rank, dual sided sticks. Had very often this issue with Corsair Value sticks, or with a XMP (Intel spec) RAM kit used with 1/2/3th gen Ryzen, manually setup to match the 1.35V XMP profile (for DDR4). EXPO does this much better now.

Diag tools like Quicktech Pro then Memtest86+ from Passmark Software and the free one were born on this 'lost era'.

- Hack and Slash : Diablo II, first game I believe that introduced grinding.

- RTS : Total Annihilation with Core Contingency. What's better than stopping your foes with a swarm of Krogoths ?