Hard drive replacement sparks singed disk situation Big data transfers can sometimes be painfully slow, but they shouldn’t cause you physical harm. Yet one Register Hardware reader feared he could have ended up in A&E after his new hard drive appeared to catch fire. Karl Sorrenson told us that he’d just finished transferring data from a Seagate hard drive onto a four-day-old …
I had the same sort of issue with a 120GB maxtor drive, the case was thankfully open as I was fitting a new fan. For the first few seconds I just looked at it burning with a nice blue flame, thinking it was just the reflection of a blue led on the fan. Then the smell hit me and I yanked the power. I was surprised that maxtor support didn't want the drive returned to investigate. It was out of warranty so all I wanted was them to pay shipping for it.
Why is there a large blob of silver soldier on the chip, shorting out a large number of legs? Looks like the sort of drop you'd get if somebody who didn't know how to solder got way too much solder on the tip of their iron and let it drip... I doubt it comes from the board, it appears to me be so large it probably contains more solder than the entire drive.
If it is solder, of course. I'm sure somebody else will have an opinion on what it is/where it came from.
.... what some of us have known all along. Modern electronic devices are powered by compressed smoke. Truly. Once the device develops a leak and the smoke escapes, it stops working. Don't believe me? I can prove it. Take two identical devices - one from which the smoke has escaped and one from which it hasn't. The smoked device doesn't work now, does it. Q.E.D.
It's the anorak, thanks.
I had an IBM drive let the smoke out years ago. In the morning I found a shutdown PC and a nasty smell. Another time I had a Maxtor drive spend all night trying to turn one of its platters into aluminium dust.
Electronics fails and sometimes burns up, modern PCs have plenty of available power to make small areas very hot but electronics is not very flammable. All those UL (underwriters laboratories) marks are there to show it isn't made from stuff that busts into flames.
I used to work for an OEM, you know, a real one with a fab line and pick and place machines. That isn't solder on the legs, its part of the chip's plastic packaging. Apparently that TI chip blew out its internal power and ground, thus the smoke. I saw something similar with Philips surface-mount capacitors. They would turn into ash when you weren't looking. Finally managed to catch one in the act, shut off the machine, and sent it back to Philips for analysis.
but carbonised chip packaging resin.
Judging from where on the chip this occurred this looks like the destruction of one of the pole drivers for the motor.
Most likely the motor shorted a phase short to ground . Harddisk motors are 3 phase brushless motors. The powercombo chip generates three pseudo-sinewaves using a pulse width mdulation technique ( it's not a real sinewave but a specific shape to yank as much current as possible through the coils , without too much power dissipation in the driver ) that are 120 degrees out of phase to drive the motor.
Even a phase short would not cause such a catastrophic failure. ( the three phases are a star configuration. so even a phase short would still leave you with one coil in the loop ( there are always 2 of the coils in the loop. So a single phase short would not cause catastrophic failure. The chances of two phases shorting out are very small.
Premature death. Send it back for an exchange. It's under warranty. Stuff happens. Always have 2 (yes TWO , not one but TWO) backups of critical data on DIFFERENT media / different hardware.
I had a very similar problem with an older model SATA-II 200GB Samsung drive.
Turned the system on after screwing in the drive and I got a hissing noise and an orange glow for about 5 seconds.
At the time I put the issue down to the fact I was using extra long screws that come with the Antec P180 case. The side screw holes on the samsung drive have no back to them meaning that you can keep turning the screw and it will just go in further and further in until its touching the PCB on the underside.
I see another user above had this problem with a Maxtor drive...
This also happened to me about 4 years ago with a brand new 120gb Maxtor drive, luckily it was replaced next working day by the website I ordered it from and luckily didn't cause any damage to any other components.
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