Damaged?

NotAGolf · 8 Apr 2010 at 19:53

Hi all. After some swift and hopefully straightforward help please...

Borrowed a friends external hard drive last night as he said it had broken, thought I'd pull it apart and plug in the drives into my desktop. So I did this, turned it on and a small fire started on the power connector part of the drive :eek.:

I powered off the computer immediately and pulled out both the power and sata cables.

I'm not fussed bout the drives as I'll chuck them away, but what I am worried abut is whether I have damaged either of the power or sata cables?? I'm scared to plug them back into my normal drive in case they have been damaged and damage my existing drive (as that would be a real PITA). Any ideas whether they could have been damaged?

Unfortunately I don't have any spares to test with. I have a spare SATA cable but not a power cable which is the one that caught fire. Everything else seems to be working fine....

Thanks.

EsaT · 8 Apr 2010 at 19:59

Of course it's only power cable which can start burning because ICs on both ends of data cable burn up before they'll give enough power to heat cable.

Is that power cable's connector still intact?
Only risk in there is that it might have melted and deformed shorting contacts.

NotAGolf · 8 Apr 2010 at 20:05

EsaT said:
Of course it's only power cable which can start burning because ICs on both ends of data cable burn up before they'll give enough power to heat cable.

Is that power cable's connector still intact?
Only risk in there is that it might have melted and deformed shorting contacts.

Thanks for the quick reply EsaT.

Both connectors look fine, I cannot see any evidence of melting or anything untoward. It must have only been on fire for a second or two before I unplugged it so I don't think there was enough time for anything to melt.

Could anything else have gone wrong with it?

unp|dissy · 8 Apr 2010 at 20:11

I wouldnt use it. If it's been on fire then it's been on fire, it's damaged.

Get a molex to sata power convertor if your PSU doesn't have any more sata power and cut that one off and secure the ends with tape