I’ve mentioned before that we use removable drives to transfer data between the data center and the office. Some of those files are very large—50 gigabytes or larger. The other day we discovered an error in one of the files that we had here at the office. The original copy at the data center was okay. Somewhere between when it was created at the data center and when we read it here, an error crept in. There is plenty of room for corruption. The file is copied to the removable, then copied from the removable, transferred across the network, and stored on the repository machine.
The quick solution to that problem is to copy with verify. That takes a little longer, but it should at least let us know if a bit gets flipped.
Saturday we ran into another error when copying a file from the removable drive to its destination on the network:

F: is the removable drive. The machine it was connected to disappeared from the network. I’m still trying to decipher that error message. I can’t decide if we got a disk error or if there was a network error. Did the disk error cause the network error? Or perhaps Windows considers a USB storage device to be a network drive. We removed the drive from that machine, connected it directly to the repository machine, and the copy went just fine. The file checked out okay, leaving me to think that the first machine is flaky.
About a year ago we purchased a Netgear ProSafe 16 port Gigabit Switch (model GS116 v1). It’s been a reliable performer, although it does get a little warm to the touch. Still, we ran it pretty hard and it never had a glitch. We bought another about 6 months ago. Last month, the first one flaked out and started running at 100 Mbps. Not good when you’re trying to copy multi-gigabyte files. This morning, the other one gave up the ghost completely and wouldn’t pass traffic at all.
I suspect that excess heat caused both switch failures. The units were operating in a normal office environment where the ambient temperature is between 75 and 80 degrees. There was no special cooling and we ran the units pretty hard what with the Web crawler and all. As I said, the switch did get very warm to the touch. In a normal office configuration where the switch doesn’t get a lot of traffic, it probably will hold up fine. But I would not recommend this switch for high duty cycles unless you have special cooling for it.