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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.
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.
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
"MOVE OUT OF YOUR PARENTS BASEMENT!"
Because the rent is cheap, and the attic is too hot.
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.
That chip you're looking at is a STMicro "SMOOTH" combo driver, most likely slightly customised for the application. This particular chip has two power regulators and a serial interface to the microcontroller (most likely I2Cish) in addition to the motor drive stuff.
Also, brushless DC motor drivers that have the drive transistors and the PID controller in the same package have been around for years (Hitachi and SGS were making them back in the late 1980s/early 1990s); the trick was getting them on the same chip as the coil driver, which is more like a BTL audio amp than a motor driver (Seagate actually did use a car audio amp, the TDA1210 I think, in the early ST4000 series drives back around 1984).
-lee