Data Clean Pakistan can safely, seamlessly and cost-effectively reduce the risks associated with Zinc whiskers environmental contamination. We Manage potentially harmful zinc whiskers with a carefully planned and executed remediation.
What Are Zinc Whiskers?
Zinc whiskers are a phenomenon that can occur on the bare metal surfaces of access flooring systems. Affected components include some wood-core and some concrete-core computer room flooring panels as well as some pedestals and stringers. The whiskers grow on the underside (plenum side) of the floor panels or the exposed surfaces of the structural components.
The whiskers are typically 2 microns in diameter and over time, (many years) the whiskers can grow to be several millimeters in length. While the whiskers are attached to the floor panel or pedestal, they are basically benign. When the whiskers break free however, they become airborne and can circulate freely throughout the facility and get blown into your equipment.
Are Zinc Whiskers Growing In Your Computer Room?
- Are you having unexplained hardware failures – particularly disk drives and power supplies?
- Are you having unexplained data corruption problems?
- Do your problems get more frequent or severe after you move equipment or work in the underfloor?
- Have you installed the latest lightning fast server or CPU only to find it doesn't seem as reliable as your old legacy system?
If you answered Yes to any of the foregoing questions, you might have Zinc Whiskers. If you think zinc whiskers are what happen when the tin man forgets to shave – guess again. Zinc whiskers are real and they could be growing right inside your computer room! Read on to learn what zinc whiskers are, where they come from, and what you can do about them.
What Is The Danger ?
Zinc is a metal and a good conductor of electricity. If a whisker comes to rest on an exposed circuit card inside your equipment, it could cause a short; most likely an intermittent short. And as you know, an intermittent problem is the most difficult to detect and fix. Symptoms of Zinc Whisker related failures range from minor data corruption or anomalies to catastrophic hardware failures. A commonly reported problem is a high incidence of power supply failures. You may also experience problems with your tapes and drives. Many victims of zinc whisker problems seem to experience an increase in problems when they migrate to new systems.
Zinc Whiskers are so small that the normal dust filters used on computer equipment are ineffective. If you want to stop zinc whiskers from entering your equipment you need HEPA filtration.
