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.

Comments

Overblown Drama

[ackthpt]

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.

Blown Out of Proportion

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:As a tech, I've never trusted Maxtor

[Cthefuture]

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.