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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.
Yeah but you can't say for certain until you compare how many Maxtors you sold versus the other brands. Anecdotal evidence won't cut it, you need to look at the records with real numbers. Personal bias can affect even the best of us.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
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 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.
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.
A stack of bad WD drives (not Raptors though) on my desk disagrees.
All drives fail - just make sure you have a good backup strategy.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
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.
This is Slashdot. Where the plural of Anecdote IS Data.
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