See, it's not THAT kind of air filter

It's a few decades ago, and this young IT pilot fish with a shiny new computer science degree is assigned responsibility for keeping a new minicomputer up and running.

"Since every other computer at the engineering company where I worked was a mainframe, it was as much pushing the risk off to me as a career perk," fish says.

"There were a lot of strange things going on with this box, but one that was causing me heartburn was the almost weekly failure of the hard-drive storage module."

That "module" is the size of a dishwasher. It has removable packs containing multiple platters that are a couple feet in diameter, and they're clearly visible through the plastic cover. Anyone dumb enough could actually take a platter out and finger the media.

But fish knows that when the disk platters are in the drive unit, it protects the platters by blowing highly filtered room air through the enclosure. So he's at a loss to understand why he's seeing weekly crashes that are totally trashing drive platters.

Vendor tech comes in to hunt for the source of the problem, and he finds it: The air inside the drive enclosure is seriously contaminated. Why isn't the filter keeping the air clean? Because the filter is badly clogged, which causes a bypass to open, which lets unfiltered room air to be blown into the pack.

And whatever particles are clogging the filter are also trashing the drive's heads and platters.

The tech tells fish that he should stop building campfires or whatever was going on in the computer room. Fish tells tech that it's an enclosed, air-conditioned room with filtered air. It just can't be that contaminated.

"One night I stayed late," says fish, "and dropped into the computer room unannounced -- to find the third-shift operator smoking a cigar the size of a zeppelin, and blowing the smoke into the drive filter intake.

"It turned out he was a serious cigar junkie, and didn't want to have to go outside to smoke. So he figured out that if he blew the smoke into this intake, it wouldn't smell enough in the morning for people to notice, and he could smoke all night, every night.

"We fired the smoke generator, and the drives stopped crashing."

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