Rudi McAnichal
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- 417
PC was working fine, then suddenly stopped, with smoke wafting out of the machine. An HDD power connector had melted. Does this sort of thing happen often? Most people seem happy to leave a PC switched on more or less permanently, but I am now wondering if that is too risky.
Any ideas about the cause? Streaks on the photo are just where I wiped away some of the soot deposit.
No electrical storm at the time, no flickering lights or other signs of mains power spikes.
This Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB, dated 02/2012, was the one originally fitted to the PC. There had been instances where the PC would lock up, and I never managed to find out whether it was a hardware issue or a software conflict (some folk said Win 7 Home Premium does not like running with Norton anti-virus). In the end I bought a new HDD (Western Digital “Black” series, which various websites told me were the most reliable), cloned the OS onto it, and installed Avast instead of Norton. No more lock-ups after that.
I deleted everything from the Seagate HDD, and put it into a spare drive bay to be used for backup storage of one particular type of data. This was manual file copying, not involving any scheduled operation, and there would have been no read/write operations involving this drive around the time it failed. The HDD connectors have not been touched in the past 18 months.
The PC died completely, and I assume some component has probably blown on the motherboard. Not worth repairing, so I bought a new PC with Win 7 Pro installed, and all my data on the WD drive is intact, for which I count myself very lucky.