Another One (almost) Bites The Dust

A few weeks ago I wrote a cautionary tale of external hard drives. Today, one of our folks discovered that an external hard drive was no longer showing up in Windows explorer. All the usual USB troubleshooting did nothing to reconnect the drive. I took it into surgery and found a heap of soot and melted plastic as I removed the case. The source of the mess...a $0.39 fan had stopped working. Judging from the discoloration on the fan's silver label, I'm assuming that the soot and plastic was from the internal workings of the fan motor. The fan could have stopped working first causing the interface board to die or vise-versa...either way, it seemed that all hope (and a lot of work not backed up) was lost. But, after a few tense moments, a little hard drive TLC, and a new USB interface, professor and data were one again reunited. This scenario plays out on a fairly regular basis in our shop and there has been more than one instance where a fan failure caused the hard drive to cook. Please back up your work and follow my tips on external hard drives posted previously in this blog.