HELP: My hard drive just caught fire!

DML1001

Member
Apr 6, 2003
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I had some free time this weekend, so I finally got around to setting up my 500 gigabyte raid array (or so I though). I plug the two drives in, hook em up to the raid plug on the motherboard, and turn on the PC. Everything looks OK, but then the raid controller can only see one of the drives. So, I shut down the PC, unplug all the drives, make sure the jumpers are all ok, put it back together, and hit the power switch...

Right away there is this loud pop and I can see an orange glow coming from under one of the hard drives... Then like half a second later all this smoke starts pouring out of the hard drive cage... Right away I rip the power cord out of the back of the machine, but the hard drive keeps burning for another minute or so.

One of the three main chips on the drive's circut board is totally fried. It completely melted out. The drive under it has a big scorch mark on it now, but the circuts on it LOOK ok. My primiary drive seems ok too (I had 3 hard drives in the machine at the time. One 160 gig with my OS on it, and the two 250 gigs that I was going to make into a raid array).

Now heres the problem... What the heck caused that? All 3 hard drives were plugged into the same power cord from the power supply, so its weird that one would catch fire like that and the other drives (and video card) that are all plugged into the same cord would be fine...

On the other hand, how the why would a hard drive do that to itself after working perfectly fine an hour before (and I've been using it for about 6 months since I bought it. I have never had any trouble with it before).

I ripped the two 250 gig drives out of the PC, and I have it running now with just my 160 gig primiary drive and everything else seems to be working, but I'm really freaked now. Whats going to catch fire in here next?

Have any of you out there had any computer components catch fire on you like this? Ever heard of this before, or have any idea what I should do? For the moment, I am assuming that something must have just been very wrong with that drive, but I'm not too confident about that...

Oh btw, my room also smells like burnt toxic chemicals now.

Any advice/comments would be appreciated.
 

DML1001

Member
Apr 6, 2003
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Here are a few quick pics if anyone is interested:

The damaged chip is the little one on the left.
Fried Drive

Here are the two 250 gig drives, side by side from the top. The scorch mark is actually on the GOOD drive. It got there because that drive was under the one that caught fire.
Drives side by side from top

Finally, here are the two drives side by side with the underside up. The bad one is on the left.
Drives side by side from bottom

The damage doesn't look that bad right now, but the drive is completely fried and it put out a LOT of smoke during the second and a half it was on for.
 

skyking

Lifer
Nov 21, 2001
22,711
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It sounds like an anomoly, a bad chip on the drive. If you had a "power supply event" like I had, it would have killed all the drives. I came home to a computer room that smelled real bad, and my fileserver had cooked both it's drives like that, along with every PCI card and the motherboard itself. I ended up tossing everything, after a few tests.
 

DML1001

Member
Apr 6, 2003
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Thanks for the reply. I hope your right and that its just a bad drive, cause I just spend about 2k building this new PC and I don't have the cash to replace every component in here if they all start dying on me like this.
 

amdskip

Lifer
Jan 6, 2001
22,530
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Shouldn't that be covered under warranty? I'd ask Maxtor to replace both drives for your troubles.
 

skyking

Lifer
Nov 21, 2001
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Yeah, I'd go the RMA route, if everything else in the computer is working fine.