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

Oh Em Gee

[Donniedarkness]

I've got a couple of Maxtors (160gb SATAII's) running in my desktop that like to run at 55+ degrees celcius....without me even doing anything. No programs running, I'm sure there's no spyware accessing the drives, and hell, it's not even connected to the internet. I wonder if we've got some out of the same batch? I've moved the drives away from each other, installed 4 more 80mm case fans (2 that push 34 cfm and 2 that push 36) to complement my 120mm rear fan and 80mm side intake fan. All that managed to make them go from about 65+ degrees to around 58 degrees (celcius, again)... after only about an hour and a half of sitting at the desktop.

The airflow is good, the case isn't crowded... it HAS to be the drives. Anyone else had this problem?

Re:Overblown Drama

[MyDixieWrecked]

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.

happened here a while back

[MrP-(at work)]

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

Lint + spark + air = more then just smoke.

[chaim79]

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.

Re:Overblown Drama

[dchamp]

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.

Re:Overblown Drama

[pLnCrZy]

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. :)