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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.
This is totally cool. The world's first Hard Drive Burner?
Full Tilt
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.
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...
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.
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
"MOVE OUT OF YOUR PARENTS BASEMENT!"
Because the rent is cheap, and the attic is too hot.
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
Ball lightning - the most painful kind of lightning.
If you're going to post a comment that looks like Haiku, at least make it a Haiku....
If his hard drive flames
I'll bet the slashdot effect
toasts his web server
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.
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]
To mess with your head this haiku is written on just a single line
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
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