Spontaneous Hard Drive Combustion

[shawty]

I guess blowing things up at some stage in an I.T. professionals career is a rite of passage :-)

[Haenk]

The most interesting failure was the explosion of a Micropolis full height (afair 9GB 7200rpm). The ball bearing literally exploded while test driving (benchmarking) it on the floor, a huge cloud of oil escaped the drive. As with the first 2GB Seagate Barracuda, these fast Micropolis drives were a huge pile of ####. Very fast when working, but constantly failing.

[AaronLee]

The most interesting failure was the explosion of a Micropolis full height (afair 9GB 7200rpm). The ball bearing literally exploded while test driving (benchmarking) it on the floor, a huge cloud of oil escaped the drive. As with the first 2GB Seagate Barracuda, these fast Micropolis drives were a huge pile of ####. Very fast when working, but constantly failing.

Micropolis - there's a name I haven't heard in ages. I remember them from the days they made floppy drives for my IMSAI 8080. I never had experience with their hard drives though.

[Zero999]

While I've had several drives die the typical ways, I've only managed to let the magic smoke out from a single IDE drive.  I had a MOLEX power Y-splitter I used that had the +5V and +12V lines swapped on one of the forks.  Oopsie.

In 1998, I bought a Maxtor IDE HDD that was so imbalanced, running it on a flat horizontal surface it would travel about half an inch a second.  Made an awful noise, too.  The seller was so impressed they brought me a replacement the same day; I think they sent it back to the manufacturer for a looksee.

It would be interesting to take it apart.

The only one combustion/explosion I can remember now, is when I had a voltage regulator on a Gigabyte GA-MA78G-S2H literally explode.  Cratered the IC and all, with an audible POP!.

Were any other parts damaged? Did you manage to repair it, at least for long enough to recover your data?

[DiTBho]

My Conner 420MB ... bought in 1994, it lasted 10 years     

[DiTBho]

does anyone know about modern Seagate Barracuda and WD-red line?

Good/bad/mumble

[AaronLee]

I was just thinking again about Micropolis, due to it being mentioned in this thread, and realized that they were located in Chatsworth, and CMI was also located in Chatsworth. Not that there was any connection between the two, AFAIK. Anyone here ever used a CMI drive? After the IBM fiasco with CMI drives was first being discussed, I personally stayed clear of all CMI drives. I delayed getting my IBM PC AT until things played out, and I was guaranteed of getting a non-CMI drive. I guess that was enough to cause the company's demise, as it wasn't long after that where I never heard of them again.

From my perspective, Micropolis was a well trusted brand, and CMI was bottom of the barrel. Complete opposites.

[NiHaoMike]

does anyone know about modern Seagate Barracuda and WD-red line?

Good/bad/mumble

Still don't trust Seagate, WD Red is pretty good.

I was just thinking again about Micropolis, due to it being mentioned in this thread, and realized that they were located in Chatsworth, and CMI was also located in Chatsworth. Not that there was any connection between the two, AFAIK. Anyone here ever used a CMI drive? After the IBM fiasco with CMI drives was first being discussed, I personally stayed clear of all CMI drives. I delayed getting my IBM PC AT until things played out, and I was guaranteed of getting a non-CMI drive. I guess that was enough to cause the company's demise, as it wasn't long after that where I never heard of them again.

From my perspective, Micropolis was a well trusted brand, and CMI was bottom of the barrel. Complete opposites.

There were the IBM "Deathstars" that were basically guaranteed to fail.

[DiTBho]

Still don't trust Seagate, WD Red is pretty good.

13/06/2017, qty=8, Seagate Barracuda, 7200.6G sATA 1000GB: still all working
25/09/2010, qty=8, Seagate Barracuda, 7200.12 sATA 500GB: still all working

my info are not updated to modern 2T-6T stuff 

[AaronLee]

Still don't trust Seagate, WD Red is pretty good.

I used Seagate's very first product, the ST-506 5 MB hard drive, and after that pretty much stuck with Seagate for a number of years. Then I started getting premature failures about the time of their 40 MB hard drives, and for a very long time I avoided them. I ended up using Western Digital, Maxtor, Hitachi, and a few others. One Samsung and never again. Anyways, maybe 10 years ago or so, based on reviews of Seagate drives, I returned to using them and have been happy without a single failure yet. I've noticed a few models that get bad reviews, but I've so far avoided those. I've bought a few Western Digitals during that same timeframe, and they've also all held up well.

[Haenk]

There were the IBM "Deathstars" that were basically guaranteed to fail.

We sold several thousands of those, and - hostly - they were not actually worse than other brands. I had a couple of them running fine for more than a decade in our computers - until the computers were shut down. None failed on us and the RMA rate was not higher than other drives.
The mentioned Seagate Barracuda (first series) and the 1.5TB Seagate ST1500DM003 (AFAIR) were an absolute RMA horror, compared to the Deathstars.

[james_s]

Seagate and Western Digital have both made a lot of good drives and a few turds. I assume that's the case for most brands, experience with one model doesn't necessarily tell you anything about their other models.