On Fri, Apr 06, 2012 at 10:13:58AM -0700, Richard C. Steffens wrote: > Alas, it turns out something on her mother board fried the hard drive. > So I still wouldn't have seen the drive in the BIOS. The tech at Pacific > Solutions speculated that it could have been a power surge. She does > have a battery backup/surge protector. So if there was a surge it was > supposed to stop it.
It is likely the system power supply - the motherboard only makes milliwatt signals, not watts of power. In really rare cases, a signal driver might make enough power to roast one of the tiny high speed signal interfaces on the drive, but those are designed to take large static spikes - the drivers on the motherboard would fail first. OTOH, this is all speculation. The most likely failure for the system power supply is the electrolytic capacitors at the output - cheap ones fail, and the output can spike. If the power supply is dusty, the electrolytics can fail faster. If the supply gets hot, electrolytics can fail faster. A power surge can kill the supply dead, but it is hard to imagine it making it through complex electronics to spike the outputs. This is a reminder to me to move my backup drives onto a different power supply than the main drive. They used to be, then I got lazy. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
