Zinc Whisker Remediation
What damage can Zinc Whiskers do?
- Unexplained or intermittent hardware failures – particularly disk drives and power supplies
- Unexplained data corruption problems
- Problems get more frequent or severe after you move equipment or work in the underfloor?
As you know unexplained or intermittent problems are the most difficult to fix.
What are Zinc Whiskers?
Zinc whiskers are a problem that can occur on the bare metal surfaces of access flooring systems. Components prone to grow zinc whiskers include certain types of wood-core and concrete-core computer room flooring panels as well as certain types of pedestals and stringers.
Zinc Whiskers can grow on the bottom (plenum side) of the access floor panels or the exposed surfaces of the pedestal or stringer components. The zinc whiskers are on average 2 microns in diameter and over time, (many years) the zinc whiskers can grow to be several millimetres in length. While the zinc whiskers are attached to the access floor panel, pedestal or stringer, they are causing no damage. However when the zinc whiskers breaks free, they then become caught in the air flow and can circulate freely throughout the facility and enter your equipment through the air intake.
Zinc Whisker are Manageable
Zinc whiskers are a genuine problem but manageable.
Data Clean has successfully
helped many companies deal with Zinc Whiskers and no doubt we will help many
more in the coming years.
Our advice is to be proactive!
We recommend you read our detailed guide to identifying Zinc Whiskers (below).
If you think your tiles may be susceptible to the growth of Zinc Whiskers we
will then arrange an analysis and testing of your facility.
Adobe Acrobat Reader is required for viewing the above file, download the latest version for free.
