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My Maxtor Hard Drive Just Caught Fire!
Dracos writes "Dell batteries you say catch fire? Well don't worry about that Dell battery, look inside your PC case at your HDD, mine just went up in smoke and flames..." Could be worse. It could be ball lightning. I hear there's a lot of that going around inside servers these days.
While I don't think Seagate will like this (they acquired Maxtor last December and are still merging them into their operation, similar to the fate of Connor), I think it is a bit overblown to compare to erupting batteries which could scorch reproductive organs if they went off in laps like so much Gamma-Ray emitting McDonald's Coffee. I've seen chips fail before and it's nothing new to see their little epoxy encased brains leaving Olympus Mons-like formations or going off like Krakatoa. More excitement can likely be found with exploding motherboard capacitors (due in large part to counterfeit electronics components.)
Now, if this is something which is widely happening then it's news.
you know that pumpkin we built a pc in? it doesn't need a candle.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm going to argue that this comparison between the cell batteries and this hard drive are not apt.
I'm not an electrical engineer but to the best of my understanding, batteries have complex chemicals and, ultimately, are a large capacitor storing energy with nothing but a insulator between the two negative and positive charges. Should these insulators decay, then disastrous effects can take place. Have you seen the pictures for the Dell laptops? Some of them are basically the entire battery slot burned out (top and bottom) with melted plastic, circuit board and screen. We're talking potential bodily harm here.
Again, I'm not an electrical engineer but as I understand it, hard drives are merely rotating discs or platters with a reading arm accessing them while they spin at high speeds. If something goes wrong, it grinds to a halt. There is minimal electronics and circuitry on them and that's what's malfunctioned here. We're not talking flames shooting out the side of a case or possible bodily harm but instead just a chip reaching it's melting point, producing a flash and growing carbon as it dies. And why does this article say "Maxtor" when this is most likely an isolated incident?! I mean, catastrophic failures happen in computer products no matter what the brand name is. Mean time to failure, right? Any microcontroller has this risk. Why doesn't the article list the age of the drive and the conditions it was operating under? I am most interested into whether or not this is under normal use and whether or not it happened immediately or if it's 2 years old.
Honestly, compare these two images: Blown up Hard drive from the article and a Dell laptop result.
I hardly find the two comparable. I've seen burned out hard drives and burned out computer components and, honestly, you have more to worry about from a cheap power supply than you do a Maxtor hard drive. When those burn out, they tend to take the things they're connected to with them.
My work here is dung.
Probably fake. Nothing to see here.
If his harddrive went up in flames,
I'd like to see the effect that slashdot
had on his webserver.
This is totally cool. The world's first Hard Drive Burner?
Full Tilt
This just in. Electricity can cause heat and electronic circuits can short out. Details at eleven.
This is nothing. Now the power supply I once had belch fire half way across the room, that was somthing.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Like your server
One of my HDDs went out with a buff couple years ago. One HDD motherbord component died. Nothing major.
Was it IBM or Maxtor, I do not recall anymore.
...stay away from Bic lighters!
I recently noticed one end has a little wheel. Turning the wheel generates sparks. The sparks themselves seem harmless, but further investigation revealed a shocking result. If you really push down hard, a valve apparently opens, combining with the sparks to emit a small flame! I know it sounds absurd, but I could reproduce it several times. Not only did a flame come out, but the lighter got hot from the flame. Further testing is needed, but I think these Bic guys should prepare a major recall.
Ive worked as a tech for 10 years now, and for every 1 problem I've seen with a Seagate or Western Digital, I see 3 problems with a Maxtor. Both in retail sales and repair, I've just seen too many problems with Maxtor's over the years. They fail about 3x as much as any other brand.
I know there's people out there who have had problems with all the brands, but overall in tens of thousands of drives I've sold or replaced, the majority of those are Maxtors. A few collueages of mine who also have been doing PC repair for 10+ years also have had the same bad luck with Maxtors.
This doesn't really suprise me. Although none of my clients' machines will be affected by this, as I haven't put a maxtor in a machine for god knows how long.
..the tabloïd-style headline ? I mean, it looks like the nerd equivalent of "Elvis Lives!", or "Brittney's secret child tells us EVERYTHING!"...
"503 Service Temporarily Unavailable"
Indeed.
Yes the hard disk is fried.But nothing like exploding Dell laptop.
Wincopy
Couldn't get to the article, but I bet since the dell incident was spun to be the "power of bloggers/internet" that you will be seeing a lot more headlines/blogs/whatever that are going to try to ride on its coat-tails.
The power of connection and freedom of communication is a very wonderful thing, but it can also have its drawbacks as well.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Well, Maxtor are copying a old tecnology, the Quantum Fireball hard drives!!!
In 1999 I had a Maxtor hard drive do exactly the same thing - on the same (read: equivalent) controller chip on the board. The smell was pretty bad too.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
And so did your webserver
that or the other usual suspects...
"my 360 caught on fire, all I did was wrap it in a shag carpet, douse it in petrol and stick it in the microwave, that's totally normal usage!"
Look people, it's call ventilation. I don't care how cool your heatsink is, or how many LEDs you have in the front of the case. If the air doesn't move over the components they'll heat up. Heat up being "additive". Given enough time they do the nasty [usually just cause a crash via PCI lockups or memory corrupt etc].
So how about you [you==stupid people] stop overclocking your shit, air out the damn case and MOVE OUT OF YOUR PARENTS BASEMENT!.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.dragonsteelmods.com Port 80
He clearly purposely set fire to his drive to remove evidence of his pirated software.
No big deal. Looks like the hard drive needs a Smoke Recharge.
Just saw a 120G maxtor melt a carrer, no real damage though.
This is just as everyone has said; If real, overblown.
Nothing to see here, move on.
What about when we start using these quantum drives, I can see it now, an error happens with the hard drive, a neutron goes flying off an atom, smashes another atom, setting off a chain reaction... Oops, there goes your whole neighborhood!
From TFA:
when I clicked on the link flames..LITERALLY came out of my head and into this text area. I was like, F**K, Dude?!
OMGWTFSATAHDD!!!!11! Tubular!!!!1111one
Ughnnn...
this is not isolated i have a Maxtor diamondmax 10 160 GB and the exact same thing happened to me the same chip the same flames and smoke and horrible smell. Im thinking design flaw. Sad part is my drive was 1 month out of warranty and i have about 30 gigs of family photos on there it was my back up drive and i didn't have them on my mail drive for lack of space the the time.
Electronic chips burn, it happends. Capacitors explode. I guess this is just the first time for him, so he blogged about it.
This is part of an under-handed campaign by hardware manufacturers. Why? Simple: to generate sales. Face it, if they make products with long lifesapns, there's no incentive for you to buy new things (laptops, hard drives, etc.). You'll keep your trusty equipment until it suffers a massive failure, which given average quality, might last ten years. Result: slow sales and low turnover. Solution: cause products to self-destruct! The only problem Dell had with the plan is that they got caught by a wave of incendiary laptops. While I doubt Maxtor would make it so obvious, if there's a spate of HDs bursting into flames, don't say you weren't warned.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Here's a Quantum FireBall that caught fire:
http://homepage.mac.com/robm/PhotoAlbum10.html
I've seen 8 or 10 of these Quantum drives go up, all from the same Philips controller on the board. Maxtor drives suck, but when they inherit this kind of shitty design flaw, it's fricken criminal.
I read TFA, and from what I understand, is drive died normally (or a cable came unplugged), like lots of drives do, and when he plugged it in "while it was out of the case" as he says, the contacts on the logic board must have short circuited on the metal surface of the case, which created some sparks. It happened to a friend (who happens to be a computer tech) once when he was checking a faulty drive.
So in essence, he was not careful with his drive. Hardly a Slashdot story, even less news.
Looks like Maxtor is definitely going downhill, or up in flames.
Only thing I really suspect about this story is the part where he "ran the drive out of the case." Was he grounded? Was it on carpet or a bare, non-conductive surface? This smacks of static electricity buildup.
I still won't buy Maxtor, though, or any local store brands that are made by Maxtor.
I mean, all drives fail at some point. I've had Maxtor, Segate, WD and several others die over the years (though not as spectacularly as TFA suggests).
Maybe a mix of brands is the answer, if you can make them co-operate in a RAID array.
The usual advice seems to be that you want the drives to be identical. Are there any major downsides to using similar spec, but different brand drives in an array?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Tech Support: We are pleased that you are happy with the speed of your new drive.
Customer: No, I mean smoke is pouring outta my harddrive man! (Screams of panic and someone saying "get the fire extinguisher!" in the background)
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Specifically the old Txxx and Dimension XPS series from 1999 or so - although not as spectacularly I must admit...
The drive was placed vertically in the front of the machine with the PCB facing the air vent. Consequently, dust and debris from the floor got sucked in, and eventually something shorted out the drive electronics. We didn't get 3" high flames, but we got a nice big blue/white flash and the magic smoke came out.
We solved the problem by raising the towers off the floor and placing plastic shields of the drive PCBs. I haven't seen the problems on more recent machines, but if you're in an environment making CAT5 cables or other stuff where you're likely to get small conductive lengths of material, it's worth bearing in mind.
I my self used Maxtor befor 80GB. And then after a year it got as many bad sectors as my hair. Then I died. I bought another one then after three months same thing it was 80GB also. But now I am using Seagate and so far after hmm probably a year and half still working well.
You cant draw much from a single incident like this - except perhaps that, under circumstances hard disk's can also catch fire.
Wincopy
The Chip Burned out. The magic smoke escaped.
Fire would be very interesting. The PCB and chip plastic are flame retardant.
and have always sucked. Their warranty expires after 365 days and their MTBF is 368 days however heavily you use them.
I have several terabytes of various data on dead Maxtors.
Next HDs I'll buy will all be Raptors (Western Digital). It may cost three times as much as anything else, but real fast access times and 10000 rpm justify it. And a serious MTBF (read : "will hopefully not die until I buy a replacement") has no price.
Repeat after me : "Do. Not. Buy. Maxtor. Ever."
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
How about when your hard-drive is located near your battery. Hard drive starts small internal fire, heats battery (which might otherwise not be so prone to explosion, but it's still Li+ and no batteries like fire), and you get a big fire.
I'd say this is still something to worry about if it's widespread. However, there are lots of reasons a particular piece of electronics can go (including many environmental factors), be it battery, hard-drive, PSU, etc... so unless more hard-drives catch smoke I'd say it's just a freak occurance and to be wary but not paranoid in the future.
That being said, in my professional and personal usage for the last few years, I have very few good things to say about Maxtor. Many drives have died, and if you read the fine-print they'll replaced your burned-out-lost-data-POS drive with a "refurbished" unit if it's past the first period of warrantee... usually meaning your replacement will happily cack itself sometime in the near future as well.
Potentially damaing remarks will be peer reviewed by other tech savvy users, if this Maxtor issue is a one in a million problem then it will fizzle. If a lot of other Maxtor drive owners have drives that go boom, there'll be a recall. It all takes care of itself.
More than likely this owner, whose hard drive was manufactured on March 1, 2005, has a 3 or 5 year warranty on that drive. I have a similar drive from Maxtor from that year that's 5 protected for years. Pity about the data though.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I was supervising over a retail chains tech shop and we had a computer checked in for diagnostics; it kept frying harddrives. You'd turn this beast on, it'd work perfectly fine, it'd post, detect CD-ROM drives across both IDE controllers, and the moment you plugged in a harddrive, BAM, it'd turn toastie and shoot flames out of the bottom. So we're like WTF, I put the new guy on it to test him, he comes back to me with a powersupply wire. APPARENTLY silverstone decided to make their BTX powerupplies such that you could plug power wires into them backwards; fans hooked into the chain would work fine, but the drive won't. So we plugged the wire back in right and told the customer who was none too happy at blowing out $600 worth of drives due to his own stupidity.
Then there was this other time where I had a powersupply that blew out motherboards. You'd plug it into a MSI board and it'd fry; plug it into another powersupply, everything was perfect, thing even booted into windows. Plug it into the bad bestec from an e-machines, and it'd turn into crispy critter and if you plugged it into the good antec test powersupply, it would no longer post. The northbridge had 2 little spots on it from melting, on 3 seperate boards of different brands. I almost wanted to keep that bugger but the customer wanted it back.
The airflow is good, the case isn't crowded... it HAS to be the drives. Anyone else had this problem?
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
And this, my friends, is why you shouldn't buy Maxtor. I've never had anything but trouble with Maxtor drives.
:)
Western Digital all the way for me
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
If it's a drive manufactured by Sony and relabled Maxtor, then we've got a story.
Super, super serial?
You have the Mission Impossible virus *joke*.
If you are lucky you have the crippled version that just blows out the electronics, leaving the data intact. In that case any drive-recovery service can get your data back for a few grand.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Maxtor=crap. My experiences and many other techs that I spoken to have found that to be the case for the last several years. Everytime I have to work on a Dell with a failed/dying HD it turns out to be a POS Maxtor drive that is usually less than a year old. I'm beyond annoyed that Seagate would sully their name by purchasing them.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I have at least 4 hard disks that have burned out in the same way. I have seen this happen many, many times.
I don't see what the fuss is all about. the guy probably shorted +5 with +12V
This is not a widespread problem. It just happens. You don't see posts on slash about frozen platters, or odd click noises.
I can take pictures if need be.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
"MOVE OUT OF YOUR PARENTS BASEMENT!"
Because the rent is cheap, and the attic is too hot.
Pot, I'd like you to meet my friend kettle. I think you two will find you have a lot in common.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
I think Seagate has the lowest failure rate of the big three I'd consider (Seagate, Western Digital or Fujitsu) - this from memory, not statistics I could look up.
Seagate and WD both offer 5 year warranties. I've RMA'd a few drives with Seagate at my work. They have yet to refuse a return.
Look at enterprise usage. Most SAN's, NAS's and enterprise servers will have Seagate drives in them. There's a reason: reliability.
If you're really concerned with performance and reliability, go with the Barracuda line. A bit more pricey, but worth the reassurance of Seagates top line.
As for using different drives in an array, no there are no issues. As long as the RAID controller can talk to them, it will use the smaller of the two (or more) sizes as the "base" for mirror or RAID calculations. The overage on the larger drives will be wasted. (even though they both may say 200Gb, there will be a slight size difference.)
I'm pretty sure if he paid attention to his drive's SMART data then he would have been able to replace the drive before it burst in to flames.
# smartctl -Asmartctl version 5.36 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 192 190 063 Pre-fail Always -
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 253 253 000 Old_age Always -
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 253 253 063 Pre-fail Always -
6 Read_Channel_Margin 0x0001 253 253 100 Pre-fail Offline -
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000a 253 252 000 Old_age Always -
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0027 241 225 187 Pre-fail Always -
9 Spontaneous_Combustion 0x002b 232 232 020 Pre-fail Always -
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x002b 239 232 157 Pre-fail Always -
and so on
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
:-)
Oh... I can see your hard drive just caught fire!
Inspite of his denial of overclocking etc,who knows what things he tried with his PC ? Duh.
Wincopy
...is much, much worse. Be glad it was just a Dell.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Nothin' new. I've worked in the computer repair industry for about 10 years now and I've had this happen to about 6 or 7 drives in my time. Never straight out of the box though. I always assumed it was from dust. Yes, mostly Maxtor drives, a couple of WD's and an IBM. Still, not as cool as a good ol' power supply explosion.
That' me, my site... sorry about the server probs... can only handle around 2200 online at a time.. host can't help me till this afternoon, they are having probs on their end.. and I was holding the drive in my hand by it's sides when it burst into flames.. fun fun -Dracos
Two years ago I came home from work for lunch (lived 5 min from work) When I entered my apt I smelled something burning. WTF? I check things out and noticed my monitor was not on and as I closer to my computer I smelt a burning smell coming from it. I took the side panel off and got a wiff of some burning silicon.
What happened was the fan failed and the CPU started a meltdown. After a few mintures I took the MB out and took the fan off to inspect the CPU. I burnt my fingers (had red marks on them for days) from grabbing the CPU after popping it out. The bottom of the cpu was burnt brown looking and had a dark brown patch from where the little temp? probe from the MB touches the cpu.
If I didn't come home for lunch who knows how hot or burnt it could have gotten.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
So its jump on the computer fire bandwagon eh?
Other things to watch out for...
1) Gasoline - I know it smells nice and all, but be careful - add a flame and you have a really terrible explosion or fire.
2) Frying pans - Don't over heat the cooking oil! You'll have a nice fire that water won't put out.
3) Metal in microwaves - Do not get metal anywhere near your running microwave! It will spark and cause a fire! Remember, you heard it first here on slashdot.
How to get real flames from you hardware:
:-)
1) Use your color laser printer to print at least 30 sheets
2) Disconnect your printer (AC and network)
3) Remove all the toners (usually 4 colour toners) and the drum
4) Take an air spray
5) Use it to clean the toner dust in the most hidden part of your printer
That's it! You'll get 70 inches flames!!!
At last I got them!
And luckily enough I can still write and read from slashdot...
What's with all the irrational Maxtor hate? I only buy Maxtor drives. They have a three year warranty and offer an advance RMA service. This means that when a drive fails they will send me a replacement, and I can use the box that the replacement came in to send them back the old drive. No need to faff about trying to find suitable packing materials on my end.
At the end of the day, all hard drives fail. Install them using at least four mounting screws, keep them ventillated, use smartmontools to keep an eye on the drives and back up your data and you won't have any problems.
I have to question how wide spread this would be. Looking at the website this is posted to... dragon steele mods... No, it wasn't modded at all. I promise.
Ball lightning - the most painful kind of lightning.
First of all, as I already replied to the specific person, my experiences do factor in sales numbers. Like on of the other users here, I've done bulk-purchases of computers for companies, and I've seen high failure rates when Maxtor drives are being used.
And this does not suprise me that so many other people here also concur to my statements. Almost every tech I've talked to has confirmed that they replace a lot more maxtors than any other drive.
If I get a service call for a flaky hard drive, I can count on that approx. 80% of the time, it's a maxtor.
The slashdot effect extends to fry equipment in a radius now...
Make America grate again!
or you might get burnt. Three weeks ago a few drops on my laptop made it look like a poorly tuned car - with black smoke propelled by the cooling fan, and unusual sound effects. Don't try it at home, or at least try to wait 2x longer than you-think-it's-dry-already, before you switch it back on.
Multi Search
I remember seeing a large disk drive start dancing around the floor like an unbalanced washing machine. That was in the 70's when a disk drive the size of a washing machine had maybe 50 meg or less (I honestly don't remember).
Now that was exciting!
To avoid accidents like that I always use old Quantum Fireballs connected with firewire.
We had one of those where I worked. The side of a chip was burnt off, like in the pictures in the article referenced, and the drive mounting bay was charred. Nothing else went wrong in the machine. It happened in a Mac G5 tower, and the drive was an 80GB unit and about 18 months old.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
the picture of hard drive looks familiar to me. I have seen some of them. One of my friends was analyzing why they fail several years ago.
And basically they reached two answers. Some of the companies have replace the halogen based flame retardants with phosphorus based flame retardants due to environmental reasons. Some of the phosphorus based flame retardants are phosphates. And the phosphates segregate out of the epoxy used to embed the die under certain heat and humidity conditions. When there are enough phosphate leached out, it shorts the leads of IC. If you are lucky, you can get the power leads short and the IC is on fire. So in short, the new flame retardant set the IC on fire. This condition happens in summer mostly because of the higher humidity.
And the second reason was that some of the IC makers have replaced the lead based solder with lead free solder due to environmental concern. Most lead free solders are tin rich. And tin grow whiskers. The tin whisker can short leads. Again, if you are lucky, you get power lines short and you get fire.
Yesterday a friend told me that the Sony battery was also short by whiskers. I didn't understand where comes the whiskers though.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Reminds me of a funny story, I wake up to the sound of someones alarm going off. Its roughly noonish so i figure someone left for work without turning off the alarm. I try to go back to sleep. 10 mins later the sound is still bothering me. That annoying buzzer sound you know the one (beeep beeep beeep beeep). I get up and realize the sound is coming from something quite a bit closer. I start walking around the house and stop outside the door of the spare bedroom. The empty room that i keep my server in. It turns out both processor fans died probably many days earlier on my dual processor p3 machine. It just happened to be warm that day and my server was now functioning as an alarm clock. Turned off the machine, placed a regular house fan beside the case. Turned it back on, went to sleep. Machine still works, no fans on the chips or power supply.. still works though
I will never buy a Maxtor drive again. I've had too many of them outright fail. It is not a coincidence that Maxtor dropped their warranty down to a mere 1 year. I have had zero problems with Seagate so far, and again, it is not a coincidence that their warranty is 5 years. I don't know what Seagate plans to do with Maxtor, since they purchased the company, but I hope part of it is fixing Maxtor's terrible reliability problems.
These types of incidents are to be expected as we continue to pile more circuits into a chip, pack more energy into batteries, and spin equipment at increasing speeds. You don't think about how much potential energy is inside a laptop battery, or how hot a processor or hard drive can get, or even how fast we're spinning optical media. Yes, the Sony batteries incident is the result of poor manfacturing processes, but laptop batteries today can last as long as 3-5 hours (the one I'm using now, about four years old, maxes out at a little under two hours). A processor today without a fan and heatsink is toast in seconds. I don't know how much heat a HD running at 10k rpm generates, but I'm sure it's significantly warmer than a 4200 or 5400 rpm drive.
I'm not saying it's significantly more dangerous, but today's computers run a lot hotter and faster than they used to, and to think that they can't catch fire is a little naive.
I was at work one night and someone in another department comes over and says a PC is on fire. I go over, black smoke shooting out the back.. horrible smell. I unplug it, bag it and put it in a back room to cool off. Next day I open it up, the seagate drive had caught fire. It was one of those seagates wrapped in a rubber cover and that melted. I took the rubber off and saw it was one of the chips.. it actually looked just like the chip in the article link, same location too. This was the coolest dead hard drive though.. the drive had been running for months (not working obviously) but spinning away grinding and grinding, finally noticed it when we had to shut down the server once and when it took forever to boot and reported a bad drive i took it out and opened it and saw that
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Why does everyone disparage Dell when it's Sony's batteries that are blazing?
A single chip on the onboard CONTROLLER critically overheated. This is not the same thing as a hard drive just randomly bursting into flames. I had this happen once before and was able to retrieve the data by getting a duplicate harddrive and switching out the controller board. Then seeing as my original drive was just recently purchased, I returned the second drive with the original drive's controller to Frys. (and before anyone crys foul, it's no different than returning the original drive, except I got to keep my data)
Considering the site's name, I fully expected to see some sweet flames painted on the platters of a windowed drive, along with one of those smoke-generators from model train locomotives.
You could even set up a software controlled oil-drip tube so you get some killer puffs out of the case for high CPU loads!
You should have read the warning label. It think they still print it in big letters on the box. MAXTOR.
site just got slashdotted. i pressed refresh, and poof! oh well...
I told them at the design meeting that putting a Pentium IV on the controller board was overkill.
A few years ago I had a Maxtor drive that went up in flames too. First it started making the usual clicking noises, then after opening the case and backing up just about everything the clicking eerily stopped and a few seconds the hard-drive was on fire! After shutting everything down and waiting for the smoke to clear I found it was the LED on the drive's logic board that was on fire.
Funnily the tech support guy that I got when I was RMA'ing the drive kept insisting that I start the computer, visit their website, and download a diagnostic utility to test the drive out. I had to tell him a dozen times that the drive was on fire and that there is not a chance in hell that I am booting my computer with it still inside.
If you look at the chip it is bowed out in the direction that the flame hit it. He took a small tourch and burned it at an angle. The capacitor next to the chip on the left is singed but nothing next to it, okay you might argue an arch. But look at the screw below it, it too is burned and nothing around it. The flame was directional and not from the chip, this guy must have been an idiot to burn it at an angle like that and try to pass it off as a Maxtor problem.
This reminds me of what happens when dc circuits are severly overloaded. Anybody who has played with enough DIY radioshack breadboards knows how it happens... A miscalculation of the current and as soon as the power is on, a small crack forms in the IC, it heats up, small flames. I bet there was a power surge when the guy turned his computer on. Is it on a surge supressor...?
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
Your site just went up in flames too.
Here's a cached copy.
Windows XP that caused the explosion?
I had Quantum drive that did the same thing when I had it on the workbench. Thank God I was wearing goggles at the time. Didn't Maxtor buy out Quantum?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Could someone please enlighten me as to what could possibly motivate Seagate to want anything to do with Maxtor technology (or name, for that matter)? Seagate has had a reputation for producing quality hard drives. I have not had a single Maxtor drive survive past the one year mark. One gaming client I had insisted on cheaper Maxtor drives to offset what he paid for the graphics card. I installed them in a RAID 0+1 configuration. The array failed in eight months due to two dead drives. I even bought them from different retailers in hopes that they wouldn't be from the same line.
Unless Seagate fires whatever cretinous halfwits make up the engineering department of Maxtor and replaces them with competent individuals, I can't help but think this acquisition is going to hurt Seagate in the long run.
For those saying that the article is fake, it honestly would surprise me if it was. Maxtor drives are sheer shit, plain and simple.
Unfortunately the site is...well... nevermind.
I had a Maxtor 6.4GB HD once. My sister claimed it no longer worked. So I plugged it into an old AT p/s and forgot to load down the rest of the outputs. Turned it on and small, bright flame appeared with magic smoke on one of the driver chips on the logic board.
I guess it won't work anymore.
And I probably should have loaded the rest of the outputs to make sure it's still in specifications.
But how many illegal mp3s did you have on the drive when your DRM trip decided enough was enough? I know both my maxtor drives died when I was sharing harry potter pre-theater release on winMx.
Apparently his web servers have caught fire as well. Service Temporarily Unavailable The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.dragonsteelmods.com Port 80
But how many illegal mp3s did you have on the drive when your DRM chip decided enough was enough? I know both my maxtor drives died when I was sharing harry potter pre-theater release on winMx.
Having bought a Fujitsu MPG, followed by a pair of IBM Deathstar 60GXP's (in RAID0 no less), guess what I took delivery of this morning... Yup, a 200Gb Maxtor.
;)
On the upside I do have some nice nomex/kevlar gloves
About four weeks ago I had smoke billow from the power cable attached to a new hard drive. Totally scorched through all the wire insulation, and it was a combo PATA cable too. This was a month after a CRT monitor puffed out; I actually dove for the fire extinguisher there.
I love summertime.
It was a brand new high capacity drive, this drive must have had the same fault. If you look closely at the pics on the /. link and the vid on youtube, it's the same chip that fries. And also the SAME PART OF THE CHIP.
The video is a bit grainy, but you can't deny what's going on with the drive.
Here is the youtube link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD-0X6P_qdU
I'm trying to get ahold of him to see what capacity and interface it was.
Time for a harddrive recall?
now his server's up in flames from the slashdot effect! What's next, his Voodoo2 SLI rig?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have you ever looked into the case of an older PC? Get something two years old sitting on the (carpeted) floor, in a house that has central air, and you have 50% of the open space in that PC full of lint and dust and other interesting stuff... even more if the owner's a smoker or has pets. You get a lint filled PC on carpet next to a sofa and something decides to make a spark and you have your fire bomb, expecially if it's right next to a case fan.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
Slashdot shouldn't encourage this guy to flame Maxtor (no pun intended). Hardware manufacturers aren't perfect, once in a while there are defects. I've have plenty of hardware that for no good reason burns out. Do I get all pissy and make a website dedicated to it? No, that is what warranties are for! Sure this seems a little more serious than hardware failure, 3 inch flames are scary. But one can't compare one isolated incident to Dell's battery recall. Dell recalled the batteries because it is more than likely going to happen to many more. By comparing these cases the author could cause people to stay away from maxtor drives for no could reason.
First post! (just in case I am...)
The end is near!
Back in the day it was lightning and floods now its hard drives catching fire, servers exploding in ball lightning and cable turning into snakes!
http://www.headfuzz.co.uk/?q=node/72 These are fairly old too. Doesn't mean it's a new problem
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
Cheech: "Wow, man, this is some great shit! What is this, man?"
Chong: "It's Labrador."
Cheech: "Labrador?"
Chong: "Yeah man, my dog ate my weed!"
Cheech: "Huh?"
Chong: "Yeah, so I followed him aroud for a week with a baggie. Freaked the little motherfucker out!"
Cheech: "You mean we're smoking dogshit????"
I don't know whether to say I don't believe that a technogeek was taking a shower or to believe that you are like most techies by sitting naked and wet at your computer.
if this Maxtor issue is a one in a million problem then it will fizzle
These one in a million problems often get reported way out of proportion.
I still see the stickers on every recent gas pump warning me not to use my cellphone, even though controlled laboratory tests are unable to reproduce an explosion from cellphone use. As I recall, the original "cases" were 2 or 3 incidents (out of BILLIONS of fillups per year), and have been attributed to things like static electricity from women's nylon stockings, etc.
Whether it was real or not, we've already seen a one in a billion occurance turn into a frenzy of panic and legislation. Never underestimate the power of scare tactics on a slow news day.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
"I took a shower and when I got out, I sat at my machine (still wet) "
"in my life, I've also had an 8-port switch blow (with smoke and a flash), several powerstrips pop and melt, a powerbrick for my powerbook turn to putty, and a floppy drive spray fire."
Maybe you should dry off before handling sensitive electronics.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I was holding the drive in my hand by it's(sic) sides when it burst into flames
Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Doctor: Then don't do that.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I always thought it was Quantum that made the Fireball... I've had alot of issues with Maxtor and heat, my last Maxtor 200GB ran at 51C idle and 62C under load, where my Seagate ran at a 43C in load.
I recently bought a Maxtor - only because it was on sale. Stuck it in a USB enclosure and it overheated and started clicking.
I RMA'ed it, now the new one is in the enclosure, with the sides removed, in my case, with a case fan blowing directly across it. My next upgrade will be a seagate (or maybe a WD).
"It could be ball lightning."
Which would explain why my dog keeps sniffing my computer case. It smells like balls.
All electronics operate with an internal supply of magic smoke,
If you let the smoke out, it stops working!
What happened there looks like he fried the power drive chip.
Lets see - All HDD PCB's have on it a power drive chip, that involves some rather large internal transistors for head positioning, and spindle rotation.
Durning fast seek situations, or spinning the drive up, these can dump a lot of current through them, on the order of 1A to 1.5A (talking 3 inch single platter drives here, YMMV)
That said, the power drive chip usually has some rather huge transistor arrays associated with controlling all that juice. Those power drive chips are generally done in either bipolar or DMOS silicon (DMOS, not CMOS, it is a power transistor process for large high voltage, high current transistors.)
Sometimes the current distribution across the transistor array is not balanced and you fry the transistors. (For the semiconductor folks - hot Vbe junction, without emitter resistance ballasting, to give current balalnce, leading to a a domino effect across multiple base-emitter junctions burning out)
What happens when the transistor fries, is that the chip inside the package gets hot enough that the plastic package above the chip melts, and then gassifies. Ka-boom!!! The gas blows a hole thru the top of the chip's package.
Been there, done that.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
About fourteen years ago I had a newly fitted IDE hard drive burst into flames in exactly the same way as this. I traced the problem to... a faulty mounting screw! To be more specific, the mounting screw was the right thread, but about 1.5mm too long. It went through the screw hole, out the other side and just (only just) ground into the edge of the multilayered PCB, shorting tracks on several different layers together. If there hadn't been a little burn mark on the end of the screw I would have assumed spontaneous combustion, but with that clue I was able to look through all the screwholes till I spotted the cause of the fire.
I would have made this comment over on the guy's own site, but he doesn't seem to have any form of comment system in place. His loss.
Hmmm Didn't Maxtor purchase Quantum's disk storage divison some time back? It could be that this is a "Quantum Fireball", just trying to live up to its name :) //Svein
Hi, I'm a signature virus. Copy my to your ~/.signature to help me spread.
Baby's on fire
Better throw her in the water
Look at her laughing
Like a heifer to the slaughter
Baby's on fire
And all the laughing boys are bitching
Waiting for photos
Oh the plot is so bewitching
http://www.enoweb.co.uk/
"But this one goes to 11!"
I've always been a bit worried about overheating components, so I tend to install a thermal fuse in the PSU. I rather have a server shutdown than a house /burn/down.
Insert
Now that modern solder does not have any lead in it, we should expect these kinds of failure more often. Pure tin has a nasty habit of extruding tiny tin wiskers which can cause shorting and burnouts similar to what happened to this hard drive.
The solution is simple - add lead to the solder.
But we know that isn't going to happen with the current environmental laws...
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Same thing happened to me. One day I heard a POP there was smoke and windows slowly died because there was no HD. Tear-down found a "popped" chip. However I did not have a grounding problem. I assumed perhaps a voltage issue.
The old iMac G3s did the same thing, I no longer recall the brand but the 10 and 13 gig drives in some of the iMacs would burn up the same way. Nothing spectacular, a puff of smoke, burnt smell and maybe scorch marks on the hdd bracket. I recall it being attributed to that model drive or just a bad batch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOIf0JmZfrQ
Oxygen/Acetelene Torch + HD....
we were bored.
...when you run `wget --mirror http://www.google.com/search?q=porn --domains=72.14.207.104 #google cache`
What does this mean for users of RAID 1 mirroring or even RAID 5 striping to protect their data?
:(
We use RAID 5 in our data center as a way to reduce the reliance on backup tapes. Obviously if our data center goes up and the fire supression can't handle it then we loose the entire RAID and have to go back to offsite backups, but if there is a fire on a drive that is just mm from it's backup, what then?
I am about to invest sevreal hundred dollars in a RAID 1 mirror for my home due to my growing digital media collection. I don't want to put drives side by said, assuming they will mirror one another, if they might both catch fire.
Maybe I need two drives in separate parts of the house or use a WAN to mirror. Yeah, that would be fast
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
You should clean the caked-on greasy dust out of your PC's case?
JoloK
I've never lost a maxtor unexpectedly, in fact I have a stack of 6 40 giggers I don't have any use for..they just outlived their usefulness when they hit 3 years old.
I just recently lost a seagate 160, a WD 160, an old IBM 40 gig and a 60 gig fujitsu, all younger than the Maxtors.
Does that mean maxtor is better and the others suck? no...I may have just bought from a really good lot.
All hard drives fail. If you look for a pattern, you'll find it.
in fact, I'm pretty sure you'll see the number "23" at least 3 more times today.
Wow after all this time my first /. post. For all of you who find it hard to believe that a Maxtor hard drive can burn on its own. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHn_6FJr0kg I tried to get Maxtor to replace this drive under warranty years ago. The rep laughed and said it wasn't possible for the drive to catch on fire. "must of been a power surge or bad wiring inside my PC." Of course they didn't replace it. So here's the story... I woke up at 3:33am and saw a strange orange glow in my PC(No I don't have neon lights in my PC). Yes I sleep with my PC on...who doesnt? Thinking my pc was had opened up a gateway to hell inside itself. (No Diablo 2 was not running at the time.) I opened up the case and saw my western digital slave HD being grilled by the Maxtor above it. Turned off the machine. Pulled the HD out and of course after inspecting the HD I was curious if it would still run. Replugged it back in decided to use my digicam to record so I turned the PC on and literally poof up in flames again. Though no Western Digital HD to grill this time. And yes the Western Digital Hard Drive survived the flames coming out the A$$ of the Maxtor. In Maxtor's defense that was the only HD i've ever had go bad from them. But since they didn't honor their warranty... they lost a customer. Yeah I can talk about how dangerous this is if you leave your pc running at home and it catches fire with no one home or if you fall asleep and it catches your house on fire... Personally I find the experience of feeling the flames near your feet while battling it out in hell in Doom3 makes for a much more immersive experience than a 7.1 dts surround system or 100 foot projected screen. New marketing campaign from Maxtor...We'll burn your "backups" faster than the MPAA can burn your rights.
Ahemm cough cough hate to beark the news to you Sony if you are reading this... This is the same model hard drive that you used in your Final Fantasy 11 online bundles for your PS2. But who knows maybe you'll get lucky and the drive won't catch the ps2 on fire while a bunch of wannabes are playing in the back of their parents pimped out Escalade. Hey how many of those did you sell? 3? that won't be a bad recall.
So what lesson did we learn from today's G.I Joe PSA? Teach your PC to stop drop and roll. And use Maxtor if you want to see your data go up in flames or use Western Digital to never hear from your data again.
Okay lets see the /. effect take down youtube and lets see all you moviemakers edit this movie into a fight scene against the star wars kid.
I'd just loaded a disc and the drive was just spinning it up when there was a 'pop' and the disc spun down. At that point, it disappeared off the ATA bus and every attempt to access it generated ATA errors. There was a slight smell of burning, so I shut down and opened the drive; sure enough, an IC (some kind of servo controller if I remember correctly) had ejected its die through the resin.
Maxtor hard drives running hot is nothing new. Their drives have always run hot. I first noticed this with their SCSI-2 4GB drive. I didn't make special arrangements and it died after several weeks. Drives with lots of platters to spin are especially subject to this. When you put together a new storage subsystem, it's a good idea to keep an eye (and a finger) on it once every couple of hours to see if it needs an extra fan. If you want the largest, state of the art drive, that spins at 10KRPM and has the largest cache, it's going to generate some heat. Do what is necessary to carry the heat away, and your hardware will be happier for it.
> Could be worse. It could be ball lightning.
Like a Quantum Fireball? (I wonder if they still make them...)
> Could be worse. It could be ball lightning.
Like a Quantum Fireball? (I wonder if they still make them...)
Maxtor makes 2 lines of drives. The diamondmax are desktop class drives, with the mtbf to prove it.
However, their maxline drives are considered raid worthy. Much higher mtbf, and a much lower failure rate in practice as well.
"Smooth"
So your Maxtor hard drive failed. Welcome to the club. I have 400 Dell computers in a building where Maxtor hard drive failures are almost a daily occurrance. Erupting in flames isn't something I've encountered, but I'm not really surprised. Furthermore, judging by the photo offered in your link, the difference between an exploding battery and a fried chip are drastic.
So a chip on your drive fried and smoldered a bit. Big deal. I owned an AMD Thunderbird (RIP) that finally got so hot that it fused to the motherboard and MELTED the thermal compound to the cooling fan. I'm not talking discoloration; I mean Arctic Silver charred black on the bottom of a copper plate. I had throw the whole thing away. I've also seen the remnants of a cockroach that managed to crawl into a chassis and chew through a sound card component, which electrocuted the cockroach and let the remains smolder through the card below it. In both cases, there was a lot of smoke (a lot more than yours, I'm afraid), but I'd hardly compare it to a lithium explosion.
wouldn't that result in said gunpowder sprinkler being sued in court? (not to mention busted by the ATF, lol!)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
| -- is a separator
anode | cathode
Under perfect use, all the converted material gets evenly distributed across the cathode.
Over multiple slow charges, the material ends up thicker where the cathode is closest to the anode... these are the whiskers your friend may have been talking about.
When the whiskers touch the separator, it shorts the cell and you cannot charge the battery any more. It may or may not be safe*, but knocking the battery around a bit will break the whiskers.
All that said, I'm not sure how this can lead to a fire or explosion in any kind of battery. I didn't think Lithium batteries even had the whisker problem.
*Do not ever do this with a lithium cell. Ever.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
this is nothing new I have had TWO maxtor harddrives explode of me. one looked very similar to this one and the other had a chip blow clean off the board. this started happening just after Maxtor purchased Quantum, and in an ironic twist of fate both of my dead HD's were call "Maxtor Quantum Fireball" and boy did they live up to the name!
<ducks>
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Seriously, this happened to me about 1 1/2 years ago. Turned on my PC, heard a pop, saw an orange glow inside my case and I freaked out. Looking at his pics, it looks exactly like what happened to mine.
What happened is the Power connect was plugged in Backwards!!!
This seems to happen with cheap power supplys where the tollerance on the connectors is bad and the plastic is softer...
Same deal, computers messed up. I was upset and worried about lost data and not paying too much attention to the connector polarity, because I was use to seeing that these connectors usualy are impossible to plug in reversed.
Same exact flames shooting out and burns.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Yes, I've actually got a few of the 80GB and under Maxtor's that have done quite well. However, I've also seen a large run of more recent Maxtor drives, and I do tend quite a flock of machines in my personal, work (Support technician for a very large number of machines), and off-work-work (private clients).
One of the interesting things you might run across with a dead Maxtor of the newer variety is an audible error code... there's something in there that plays a tone somewhat akin to an old cellphone. Of course, I've seen worse... Fujitsu used to have a terrible track record where I previously worked, with about a 30-50% rate of failure... some within weeks of installation.
This smells of a hoax. The burn marks look very much like they were started from the outside- maybe a magnifying glass, I don't know. It just doesn't look like the eruptions you should see if components catch fire.
I had a plextor external cd-rw drive burn up once, but it was the power supply that caught on fire. I find it hard to believe that the chip in these photos actually caught fire.
All electronic components are manufactured with a canister of smoke in them. Once that canister of smoke has been released the component is no longer of any use.
Single largest cause of failure of the Tandy 3000 (an early 286) was fire.
Stores were not allowed (!) to sell these to consumers, only to business customers.
I'm not sure if the fire detail was disclosed or not.
The fact that we couldn't sell 286s to home user was the last straw for me and that sales job.
Tandy had missed the boat so thoroughly, but that was the worst, when consumer machines were already ubiquitous
and much cheaper everywhere, and yet we were expected to sell obsolete crap. Obsolete, as in, machines without hard drives and with CGA video as late as 1989.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Ball Lightning? Actually.... I'm aware of a firm who's building took a power surge. the first surge simply caused a little smoke from some light fixtures which set off smoke detectors. Since they had had a rash of false alarms the previous couple of weeks the alarms weren't taken too seriously - until people smelled smoke. Even then, no panic but my SO had decided to bail just to be safe despite being told not to worry. Later we learned that they took yet another hit, this one big enough to shoot FLAMES out of electrical items like the aforementioned light fixtures - it drove one woman out of an office screaming apparently, she claims a ball of flame chased her out. The whole building bailed at this point and the guys with hoses came in to ruin the party. Quite a bit of stuff was ruined, alot of it due to the water. Strangely the servers seemed to have survived but they lost cooling to their data center so services have been hampered to say the least. Perhaps an UPS saved the servers but from th esounds of it I don't know how - if they were lucky it was on a different power feed maybe. The place is a total mess and the two floors they occupy are having to be completely gutted\redone and the company relocated for awhile. Talk about a serious PITA! Disaster plans do sometimes come in handy it seems, bet they have updated their's now :-)
:-P
Interestingly - the electric company claims they had nothing to do with this. That all systems were just fine and are pointing to the building guys. It's still not clear what EXACTLY occured but I cannot imagine what it must have been like being chased out of an office by flames shooting out of something above my desk. that employee is apparently traumatized enough that they refuse to set foot into the building and I'm not sure I blame them.
So yeah- ball lightning seems to be occuring these days
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Ever turn a power supply into a jet engine? It was around 1993. My friend and I were working on my friends 486 SX25 when we accidently reversed the polarity to the on/off switch. When powered on a 12 inch bright blue flame shot out of the power supply nearly taking flesh off my friends arm...
Back in 2003, a Maxtor HD at work went up in smoke just like in the article's pics. It happened right as the machine got turned on by a tech doing maintenance.
i suggest to a client to add a usb external hard drive. well it worked for like 2 days. he handed it to me and said make it work. i took it apart, after it not showing up after i plugged it in. pushed power, with the drive sorta dangleing to the side, pcboard side out. about a half second later the same thing happened to me, caught fire. flames comming from the bigger chip on the hard drive. i couldnt reach aount to get the power cord out fast enough. glad to see im not the only one this has happened to.
I had a intern improperly mount a hard drive and this happened. He had the bottom circuit board touching metal. It shorted out and cooked like this one. I think someone is trying to get a free drive through bad publicity. Next we will have guys suing Playboy for a free playmate of their own because they got tennis elbow looking at the last issue.
I installed a new dvd burner in my brother's computer and when I turned it on I saw a white hot glowing ember on the harddrive and then there was a very loud pop before I could kill the power. The rest of the computer was fine but the harddrive looks identical to the pictures that were posted on his site. It had the same two holes blown through the chip.
I've had this happen to me TWICE. Both were maxtor drives, same chip (motor controller).
If you don't think this is anything dangerous or causing damage outside the hard drive, think again.
Harddrives are hooked to your 12V line in your computer, and can do drastic things, including shorting 12V to 5V, 12V to ground, or all three together, also 12V to data lines. Try sending 12V to your southbridge on your motherboard, and count the milliseconds until everything else in your pc is hosed.
That chip can have 1 - 2 Amps flowing through it easy. First your hdd goes, then it takes your mobo, cpu, ram, video card, and psu with it, as well as scortching the inside of your case, and possibly burning your house down. If there are any other folks out there with the same problem, this becomes a class-action situation.
Dang it I knew I shouldn't have hired that pyro from Dell.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
I bought a new Silverstone Powersupply, the $215; 600 watt continuous power one with the cables you connect as you need... installed, all hooked up, 4 sata WD 200 gig drives, all hooked up ready to go.... or so I thought. I hit the power button POW POW ZAP ZOT SSSSSSSSSS flames... yanking the cable out of the back and tossing my glass of tea on the flames I then proceeded whole heartedly pissed off to inspect as to WTF did this to all my precious data. Apparently during assembly the jack off who put the molex pins in the cable switched the 15 and 5 volt wires on the power supply side... so the end result was two fried drives from that cable and one above them with fire damage. Silverstone tried to claim I put it in backwards.... I took pretty pictures to make them stfu and pay for my drives and the loss of data. 110 gigs of pirated music, 300+ gigs of anime and tons of files and personal data collected over time... (Note/Moral: If you buy ANY powersupply with custom cables be sure to check the molex pin config BEFORE hitting that power button)
Did they pay for that?
How much is pirated data worth anyway? I remember one guy I knew about 10 years back who was proud of the fact that he had over $200k worth of pirated software. Not that he needed it or could even use most of that stuff...
Update September 1st: Well as per instruction by Maxtor, I only need to send back the top cover of the HDD with the information on it, so when I took the top off I discovered the platters were scorched as well, at least they look scorched to me..... but I am sure someone will correct me.... I've added a bunch of pics of the platters and drive without the top
I got pictures when it happened in a dell server here. http://maxtorwogniu.blox.pl/