What's the Hardiest Hardware You've Seen?

mrsev asks: "I work in a lab and so have lots of strange equipment around me. Recently I found an old 256Mb USB Flash Disk, that I had been looking for 6 months. This would not be amazing but for the fact that it was frozen in a block of ice in one of our -80C freezers (-112F). It must have fallen from my top pocket when I was reaching in. After chiping it out and a quick thaw and dry ... it worked!! All my data was intact and there were no problems. I am now looking for a victim to test in our liquid nitrogen storage facility. My question is what is the strangest hardware survival you have seen."

Comments

Tough CPU

[WavyGravy-R5]

I recently had an AMD 1400 Mhz chip that was used for my schools Journalism department. It has been dropped easily a few dozen times, left behind a VERY dirty, dusty desk for about a month, AND has been submerged in photo developing chemicals. Out of sheer curiosity, I put it on one of the boards the other day, and in amazement it still worked.

The shack

[splattertrousers]

I once bought something at RadioShack, and two weeks later, it still worked!

That was one for the record books.

My roomate's XBOX

[satanami69]

See here

Memory and low temperatures

[Tiersten]

Low temperatures actually improves data retention in SRAM when it's unpowered, I know it's not Flash but they both do rely on storing charge.

The fact crazy people have previously immersed their PC in liquid nitrogen and still had a functional PC at the end shows that it shouldn't damage most electronics.

So assuming the low temperature didn't crack the PCB or chip leads and the moisture didn't short anything then it's not too surprising that it survived.

Powerbook dropped down the stairs

[joelparker]

I accidentally dropped my Powerbook Duo
down a long flight of concrete stairs...
it bounced all the way to the bottom.

It survived with all data intact,
God bless Apple's case designers. :)

Re:Powerbook dropped down the stairs

[adamjaskie]

A kid in my dorm has dropped his powerbook g4 several times. One time it fell off his lap, and hit the edge of a table leg on the way down, taking a chunk out of the table leg, and wedging it between two parts of the case. Another time, he dropped it off his desk, and it hit something on the floor right on edge, putting a dent in the side of the keyboard area. Then, it slipped out of his backpack, tumbled down a flight of stairs, and bounced through the railing to fall an entire story. It hit the railing on the way down, denting the edge of the laptop, and finally landed corner first on the concrete floor. He has the bright spots on the screen, two mashed corners, two dented sides, a dent in the side of the screen area, and a slightly bowed screen. And it still works perfectly, other than one of the USB ports being mashed beyond recognition, and some creative application of a 20 pound instrument transformer to bend the metal far enough to insert the charging plug.

IBM Thinkpad laptop

[Komarosu]

Now i've got a REAL monster, a Pentium 1 133mhz IBM thinkpad from a long time ago. Its been dropped down about 3 flights of concreate stairs, been hit in the LCD screen by a football a few times, survived the fury of a 6 year old kid, dropped on tarmac from 3-4ft.

The verdict? A nackered case, a flickery LCD, but a perfect, no badcluster HDD and it still works perfectly.

My SCSI drive

[ivanmarsh]

I've got a ~12 year old Seagate SCSI drive that still works fine.

You can cook eggs on it while it's running, but it still works.

Hardiest hardware

[wowbagger]

The winner and still champion

Floodwaters...

[GR|MLOCK]

The summer after my freshman year, I was working as a technician at a computer shop. We had horrible floods that summer, and a customer brought in an Acer 486DX66. It had been underwater for a week, buried in mud on the first floor of their house. He was only bringing it in to get a quote for the insurance company, and of course after taking one look at it we wrote it off completely.

The next week I had some free time and noticed the box sitting in the corner. I took it out back, turned the hose on it, removed and washed the cpu and memory, took it inside and plugged it in.

They were still using that computer as the fax server when I quit.

USB 256 drive that should have been dead.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

I had it in my shorts, I hit the pool. Still did not know it was in my short, threw them in the wash. Then the drier.

Found the damn thing when I was folding my shorts the next day, with water on the inside of it. Set it up on desk at work for about 3 days and pluged it in as it had the only known good copy of some offsite routers. Took a couple seconds and wamo there is my data, pull it off to the desktop. Reach down and find the little bugger all fogged up on the inside. 2 weeks on my desk for a real long term dry out and that damn thing still works like a charm.

Go figre....

Anything Nintendo

[Apreche]

Nintendo controllers and systems have classically been made of ultra-durable plastic of doom. I remember throwing controllers again brick walls, and dropping gamecubes painfully high distances. Of course, I've never had any of these things break or stop working. I'm sure that when cockroaches rule the earth they will all play SNES games.

Fire Fire Fire

[g1zmo]

Just a few days ago I caught a rackmounted server on fire.

Turns out (and I know I've done this many times before without starting any type of fire) I had the ribbon cable in backwards on the floppy drive. When I turned the power on, immediately the power wires started glowing orange and the flames were about a foot high and smoke poured out of the case.

After I pulled the plug, only one segment of the power harness was melted (the part with the small floppy connector), so I cut that out, put the floppy cable in correctly, plugged in the other floppy power lead, and turned it back on.

Shocked the Hell outta me, but the thing still worked, and has been working ever since.

My trusty hammer

[Malfourmed]

My trusty hammer.

Sure I've had to change the head a couple of times, and also the handle, but aside from that it's as good as new.

Sony Discman

[generationxyu]

I once dropped a (at the time broken) Sony Discman out my second floor window, it first hit a ledge, and then the ground, landed face up, with the top open. I wasn't too worried about it since it was broken. It then proceeded to get rained on for a week. When I finally got it back inside, the PCB was coated in mud, and it was essentially a mess. I washed it off with water (after all, i might as well use the parts for something). Turn it on, it works. Apparently rain and mud fixes Sony Discmen.