3 years ago I kept frying HDDs until an old mentor pointed out my PSU was the issue

Back in 2021 I had 4 drives die in 6 months at my shop in Austin, thought it was bad luck or bad batches. Turned out my bench power supply was outputting 13.8V instead of 12V, slowly cooking everything. Anyone else ever waste time chasing ghosts instead of checking the basics first?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_holly2d ago

Phill always said check ripple voltage not just voltage.

ellis.mia2d ago

And that's the thing, you assume a PSU is either working or dead, not slowly killing your drives over months. I had a similar thing with a batch of bad SATA cables once, took me way too long to realize the cables were the common link instead of the drives.

simonh742d ago

Oh man, bad SATA cables are the worst, had a similar nightmare with intermittent corruption that I chased for weeks.