What's Killing My Drives?
 

In the last six months I've had four optical drives die on me - two plain CD-ROM, a DVD-ROM, and a CD-RW. Four different drive manufacturers, three computers, two rooms, drives ranged from six months to four years old. All had the same symptom: an extremely hot underside (and the faint smell of melting plastic).

What the hell?

I just fixed two computers from two different people for the exact same thing. The CDRW drives burned up. Took one apart and sure enough the motor drive IC was smoked. I've seen a lot of dead drives over the years but not one that smoked. Now two that smoked in a week. Just weird.

You only have changed the optical drives?
Do you have any harddrive below them?

It could have been because of the hot summer.
Or the Boogie man.

Days are getting shorter, nights longer, and weather colder. This means more time in the house. This means much more time watching porn while surfing the internet.

Solution? Either (a)Cut off penis (b) water cool optical drives (c) stock up on spare drives before the solstice

Thinking about it one of them told me they were installing aoHELl could be those blasted install disks you get in the mail. Someone figured out a way to make them spin up and accelerate to the point where the drive fries. Conspiracy between aoHELl and component manuf. to make you buy a new drive.

It's ok with me. I DON'T ever touch a aol disk. I won't even install it if someone asks. I will replace their dead drives, for a fee.

To address the question... :D

Maybe better case ventilation would be in order here. You can attach a small 40 mm fan behind a face place, which would be right under the drive itself, or just somehow fit one right under the drive, or drive cage.

You burn a lot of CDs/DVDs don't you? ;)

I really don't like your first option, pH. Besides, if was all the porn, my router and DSL modem would've melted.

I don't think it's related to the discs used (not that I have anything against torching AOL cds). One of the drives that cooked hadn't been used in a couple months, and all of them died with no disc inside.

This last one baked a hard drive with some important crap on it. I've got to be more mindful of backups, but I'm afraid to buy a burner to do it with.

Puzzling... either you have poor case ventilation, or you just buy cheap stuff!

I have grown really enamored with the external dvd burner I have at work. Just take it from PC to PC and burn multisession dvd-rs with it. Great for keeping all the actual valuable stuff in a reasonably tiny package. I think the external box was maybe CAD$30, and it even has a little fan in it

You kind of didn't say what is the rest of your hardware like. What kind of power are you running it off of. A bit more detailed system specs could spark a few more ideas. Have you tried running an optical drive off of a different molex connector?

Various motherboards, from old slot-A to a fairly new Nforce2; various PSU's, from generic came-with-the-case to high test Antec's.

When the drives died, they were very dead. Not detected by the mobo, don't respond to the eject button, the underside gets too hot to touch within a minute of powering on. They had little in common but the mode of failure and my ownership. :confused:

Bad PSU voltages?

I suppose it could be...but that would turn the mystery into why three different PSU's kill opticals and nothing else.

Wish I had more equipment and knowledge. :(

If it was all within the same case I'd say you have an airflow problem in your 51/2" area. Something is getting very hot and is killing your drives. Get a new case and rearange some stuff insied of it. I kow optical drives are dirt cheap nowdays but a few here and a few there and you could have bought a decent case for all the money spent. I'd check that area. I bet it has very little to no airflow at all.

i've lost 4 hard drives to a overloaded power supply.