Despite the pervasiveness of electronics in IT, this still relies on mechanical components. These include diskettes, hard disks, removable hard disks, disk drives, printers, scanners etc., plus fans for processors and power supply units. The demands made on these items are ever more exacting as requirements for quality and speed increase. Even apparently trivial impurities can cause a device to develop a fault. Large amounts of dust and dirt can be generated, for example, in connection with
work on walls, raised floors or other parts of the building,
hardware upgrades,
unpacking of equipment (e.g. escape of styrofoam packaging materials).
This can cause corresponding hardware failures.
In most cases, safety mechanisms provided in the devices will switch them off promptly. While this may keep down the damage, repair costs and downtime, nevertheless the device concerned will still be out of action.
Examples
A server had been placed in a media room which also contained a photocopying machine and a normal paper fax machine, and first the processor fan and then the power supply unit fan failed due to the high level of dust in the room. The failure of the processor fan caused the server to crash sporadically. Eventually the power supply unit fan failed also, causing the power supply unit to overheat and short circuit. This in turn induced the total failure of the server.
To hang a wall panel in an office, holes were drilled into the wall by the site technical service. The employee whose office it was had left his office for a short time. When he returned to his desk he found that his PC would not work any more. The reason for this was the dust generated by the drilling, which had penetrated into the PC power supply unit through the ventilation slits.
