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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.
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?"
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.
That's funny.. A friend of mine works at a very large Scandinavian distributor of hardware and he's telling me that Maxtor is on par with other hard drives. Most people rely so heavily on Seagate, but five year warranty is commonplace nowadays and the fact is that these drives fail as often as other major brands (more or less). At least that's what I've heard. If anyone has other info, please correct me.
Full Tilt
This IS in comparison to the SALES numbers.
The airflow is good, the case isn't crowded... it HAS to be the drives. Anyone else had this problem?
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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.
this is blown out of proportion, but I think he's inflating it so for advertising revenue. did you see all the adverts on that page?
I've had similar things happen to electrical equipment in the past. I had a Pentium3's fan die in a server at work. we came in in the morning and smelled burnt plastic, and when we discovered that the server wasn't on, we opened it up only to find a 3" crater in the motherboard.
I also had something similar happen with my G4 upgrade in my old desktop machine. the fan died, but the machine kept running. I woke up and smelled hot plastic, but didn't know what it was... I took a shower and when I got out, I sat at my machine (still wet) and every application had unexpectedly quit. That's when I noticed a strange sound and I opened the side of the machine to see the processor fan vibrating and turning slowly. I touched the heatsink to feel how hot it was and the dampness on my hands actually caused a sizzle sound and I burned my fingertip.
I could imagine that if I had left for work before inspecting that, I could have started a fire.
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.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
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
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It really is amazing that I never burned the house down as a kid. If your not squeemish check out the results of my little fire. Feel free to use me as a bad example for the kids, "see what happens when you do stupid shit arround fire".
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
Not that it's really important, but a battery isn't the same as a capacitor. Batteries use chemical processes to produce electricity, capacitors store electricity across conductive plates. As well, batteries aren't necessarily dangerous just because they're batteries, the particular kind of battery determines how dangerous it is (with lithium-ion batteries falling squarely on the more-dangerous end of consumer batteries in that particular area).
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'
I was on the staff for a LAN party group. At one event we had participants have two power supplies blow caps, rather loudly - about like a small firecracker, within a few minutes of each other. The caps were completely split open, and there was grey papery dust all over the insides of the computer.
One of them took out every component in the computer except for the floppy drive. Both had cases & PSU's they'd gotten from a retailer known for cheap components. The power supplies were by a company whose name starts with "D" and rhymes with "Beere". Any time I see a PC with one of those, I tell people to replace the PSU immediately.
Thats a broad generalization. I had a 10gb maxtor drive bouncing around in the rear window of my car for almost two years. When I finaly got around to pulling it out I put it in a pc to test, the drive worked perfectly with no noise and no overheating.
I often have trouble remembering which way is out of bed in the morning.
Seems like ALL the manufacturers get stuck in such cycles.
:)
I remember when WD sucked, then they were awesome, then they sucked again, then they were awesome again, etc. Seagate sucked, then they were awesome, then they sucked again. Maxtor was awesome, then they sucked... IBM deskstar were the shit until they turned into shit... quiet little Samsung always made a reasonably quiet and decently-performing drive, odd they didn't get more publicity. Notice a pattern?
I have 4 Maxtor drives that are about 3 years old and still running like champs. Not a single issue. I have a couple Samsungs in another box - no issues. And my current WD drive is rock-solid. However, for a couple years there, I was getting more free drives from Western Digital than any one person should be allowed.
Dunno about that, when my Abit VP6 gave up the ghost (sent it back for RMA once for bad caps, they put the same fugging brand back in as replacements!) not only did it take out the power supply with it, but it put on a fantastic light show as well. Yep, it was arcing like mad, and by the time I managed to pull the machine out from under the desk and open up the case, the motherboard had caught fire. Surprisingly, all the other components (video cards, SCSI card, all the drives, sound card, etc.) all survived, and only minor corruption on the /home HDD, and reiserFSCK came to the rescue on that.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50