Platform: All Hardware

Here's a trick I came up with a week ago. If you work in any sort of data center or high server density server room, it's always very difficult to identify a noise from a particular fan or hard drive. Last week our phone system had developed a drive with a head or bearing problem, but there were no log entries on the machine to identify the drive. Since the drives are hot swappable, it was no big deal to pull the drive out while the system is running. This system has high-availability requirements, too. The problem here was that the drives are closely packed together, and the high pitched sound coming from the bad drive was such that it made it very difficult to identify which drive was the problem one. One potential solution is a stethescope. I did not have one immediately available to me. Another solutions which I did have available was to use an inexpensive sound level meter. I have an older version of the Radio Shack model 33-4050 that I keep in my toolkit (I used to install car stereos and consider myself a home theater enthusiast as well). Using the sound meter on the A weighting, I could move the meter up and down across the array of drives and find the one making the loudest noise. That one was the bad one, and I was able to easily identify it where my ears failed me.