Our friends over at Techbuy thought this hard drive, which has been sent back for warranty, looked rather interesting. It's certainly not
your run-of-the-mill dead hard drive.
The drive in question is a Seagate Cheetah 15,000rpm, 73GB Ultra 320 SCSI drive (Model ST373453LW) from around 2 years ago. The customer was told by Techbuy's RMA department to send it back after he reported that it he "smelt something burning and found burn marks on the drive"
This is the drive they received.
This is what is looked like on the bottom.
And closer up.
As you can see, something has let go in a big way on this drive, the wires going into the motor have all but disappeared, and by the look of the burn marks, it seems it has actually caught fire, albeit briefly.
Quite unusual to say the least, for what is generally one of the most reliable drives on the market, and as they sold back then for nearly AU$1000, you'd expect it to be.
Here at OzHardware, we believe the actual cause of the drive failure is that the magic smoke escaped. You see everything in computers, and all electronics for that matter, runs on magic smoke. Think about it, if you ever see the magic smoke 'escaping' from your computer, it's stopped working hasn't it? of course it has!
I don't think this customer will have any problems with warranty on this one.
