Is my hard drive thrashed?

[Tim]

Tim:
>> How did you do that?  High speed air blasting across things *can* cause
>> damage due to static electricity generation.

Vivek J. Patankar:
> Hmm. We do that all the time where I work. Even with the servers when 
> they are down for their 6 monthly preventive maintainance. Never had a 
> problem, not once.

I get away with doing it, too.  But other's haven't.  Doing so flies in
the face of what we learnt about anti-static protection years ago.  To
play a bit safer, I try to avoid blowing air across circuitry, and
concentrate on just the cleaning the vents through the chassis.

I'd also point out that static damage doesn't often cause instant death,
it breaks things down a bit, so that they *may* fail so much later that
you'd never attribute what you did as being the cause.

-- 
(This box runs FC6, my others run FC4 & FC5, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

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