My primary computer had a sudden failure yesterday. I was working, I
turned around to grab something, and the whole thing just powered down
while I was looking away. I tried everything to power it back up, but
nothing worked. However, it wasn't *completely* dead because two LEDs
on the motherboard came on, just nothing else. So, I started to pull it
apart and do some investigation. I pulled another power supply and
plugged just the motherboard into it, and viola, it came up. So, I guess
the 12v rail on my other power supply died. I went to Best Buy to buy a
new power supply (the one I tested with really wasn't big enough for
this machine), bring it back home, and got to work replacing the entire
power supply.
I happen to always buy fully modular power supplies if I can, so I was
in the process of swapping things out, and I didn't realize I had
plugged a Corsair modular SATA power cable in the SATA connector on the
new power supply and ran it to the bank of 4 SSDs I have in my main
computer. Until I powered the new EVGA power supply and immediately
heard some odd crackling followed by the unmistakable smell of magic
smoke (quite strong I might add). So, moral of this story is, while the
EVGA and Corsair modular connectors for SATA power cables use identical
physical connectors and will happily plug in on each other's power
supplies, how they wire them up most definitely is *not* identical, and
all four SSDs that were plugged into that modular SATA power cable are
now toast. This includes my primary workstation and all data that was
on it. Fortunately, I keep backups and what not, but I am currently
sending this email from my laptop and I will likely loose the next day
to two days to the task of reinstalling from scratch, then restoring
from backup (even as I write this, my laptop is writing a Fedora 27 Beta
USB boot key). Joy!
--
Doug Ledford <dledford@xxxxxxxxxx>
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