My Maxtor Hard Drive Just Caught Fire! 386
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.
Re:Overblown Drama (Score:4, Informative)
The motherboard's power supply caps aren't exciting when they fail. The ones that we had a huge rash of a few years back failed silently (at least in terms of being able to hear them over the fan noise) and just bubbled a little. I let the smoke out of a capacitor once by plugging too much power into it, and all that happened was the little pre-stressed piece at the end burst open like an airbag cover or something, and a bunch of foul-smelling smoke that I ran away from rather than breathe spurted out of it; it was a fairly thick cloud but it only shot out about sixteen inches. Those weren't on a motherboard, but in some dinky (and crappy) powered speakers.
As a tech, I've never trusted Maxtor (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Blown Out of Proportion (Score:5, Informative)
Short circuit (Score:5, Informative)
So in essence, he was not careful with his drive. Hardly a Slashdot story, even less news.
This recording will self-destruct in 5 seconds (Score:2, Informative)
If you are lucky you have the crippled version that just blows out the electronics, leaving the data intact. In that case any drive-recovery service can get your data back for a few grand.
yep my hdd flamed out! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:As a tech, I've never trusted Maxtor (Score:2, Informative)
Maxtor used to be a good brand. All of our older Dell's have Maxtor drives that are approaching 7-8 years of reliable use. They work great. It's just the drives in the past few years, I guess.
Now, whenever anything in our office breaks, we joke that it must be a Maxtor.
Re:Same thing happened to me (Score:2, Informative)
Real flames? Read This! (Score:2, Informative)
1) Use your color laser printer to print at least 30 sheets
2) Disconnect your printer (AC and network)
3) Remove all the toners (usually 4 colour toners) and the drum
4) Take an air spray
5) Use it to clean the toner dust in the most hidden part of your printer
That's it! You'll get 70 inches flames!!!
At last I got them!
And luckily enough I can still write and read from slashdot...
Re:As a tech, I've never trusted Maxtor (Score:3, Informative)
Re:As a tech, I've never trusted Maxtor (Score:1, Informative)
the picture of hard drive looks familiar to me (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Blown Out of Proportion (Score:4, Informative)
Batteries are not large capacitors, the primary dangers of big capacitors are sudden complete discharges when sorted or electrolytics with reversed polarity. Explosive and dangerous (more for the shock and the electrolyte fumes) but not the same scope as batteries.
Batteries are electrochemical storage devices, the power is derived from chemical reactions not capacitive storage. This in itself isn't particularly bad. The problem with the current crop of batteries is that that the chemicals employed get hot they release highly flammible chemicals and oxygen, and when those catch fire the heat caises the realase of more flammible chemicals and oxygen. This is known as a thermal runaway effect.
New formulations of lithium batteries avoid this problem by using a different mixture.
Re:Oh Em Gee (Score:3, Informative)
Alternately, there's the "touch" test. If the drive feels too hot to be comfortably touched, it's too hot to live long. A well cooled drive will feel cool to the touch, even under heavy loads.
What Happened (from an HDD chip designer) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What Happened (from an HDD chip designer) (Score:3, Informative)
The chip would overheat and the drive heads would repeatedly seek.
Active cooling seemed to help prevent premature failure.
Later drives/models seem to lack the "SMOOTH" chip or have a much smaller (dieshrunk?) version/revision.
Re:What Happened (from an HDD chip designer) (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Overblown Drama (Score:3, Informative)
Curse the bastards [i-curse.com]