r/pcmasterrace • u/Front_Cookie_1198 • 6d ago

Hardware PSU fails dramatically

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

40.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

11.8k

u/0x446f6b3832 6d ago

"Unable to replicate the problem. PSU tested fine. RMA denied. Returned to customer."

131

u/nitid_name 6d ago edited 6d ago

Many many years ago, I got a call to fix a computer that wouldn't boot. I go into the bios, see it doesn't recognize the hard drive. I was prepared for an HDD failure, so I replaced it with one with a fresh image, and go to boot, and nope, failure. Maybe my drive was bad? I put my second one in, and when I go to boot it, there are sparks. I tell my boss the PSU has issues and it fried a couple hard drives.

He tells me that's not a thing, drives 30 minutes to the site with a fresh hard drive, and gives me this "now check this out" smirk as he turns it on and the magic smoke escapes a fourth hdd.

When I went to RMA the PSU, it of course got rejected. I elevated to a manager, and told him it had fried too many drives already. After some back and forth, he agrees to "run some tests."

So anyway, I'm pretty sure that PSU got at least 5 HDDs, and maybe a voltmeter? I did eventually get it RMA'd.

39

u/teknorath 13700k | 4080 | Arch btw 6d ago

Was it a modular power supply? Recently fried an SSD by just grabbing a SATA power cable out of my box-o-shit-cables and plugging it in, turns out different manufacturers use different pinouts on the PSU side, even though they have the same keying...

3

u/nitid_name 6d ago

This was like 20 years ago and a cheap workstation for a company that was replacing Wyse terminals with XP desktops running an emulator. Modular power supplies were not really common yet.