You Can't Teach a New Dog Old Tricks

     Back in The Day, when people would come to me teary-eyed at the prospect of trying to replace the MP3s they had carefully collected from Napster (before it was shut down), I would tell them to check their IDE cables. Those ribbon cables, I insisted, are far more likely to fail than your hard drive. Most of the time I was right and in fact this advice earned me gratitude and free drinks on many occasions. Of course, the introduction of the serial ATA interface--and the SATA cable--fixed all that, right?
     My newly minted computer, Dogbert, was birthed when I was fidgeting with the innards of my entertainment PC after a five mile run in the humid summer months of Boston. A drop of sweat rendered a component useless and after trying a few combinations of motherboards, RAM, and CPUs, I decided it was time for one of those new-fangled quad-core Intel processors I’d heard so much about. Dogbert was fitted with a 150 GB WD-Raptor--a 10,000 rpm SATA beast--for solidus (that’s forward-slash, the root directory of a Linux machine for you non-uber-geeks) along with a Hitachi 1 TB monster for /home. After about four months Dogbert became a little flaky as the ring buffer was filled with the dreaded “I/O seek errors” from the Raptor. What a piece of junk, I thought.
     After many moons the problem worsened and Dogbert occasionally couldn’t recognize the Raptor drive upon booting, which confounded my efforts at WOL from work--how else am I going to have the latest Blueray waiting for me when I get home? I saved an image of solidus and ponied up the dough for another Raptor, after all how could I live without Dogbert while his brain was in transit for warranty replacement?
     The problem worsened and I eventually bit the bullet and installed the new Raptor drive, intending to clone solidus to it before it finally died, but Dogbert switched off during the POST... What could be happening? I hit the power button in defiance only to see thick black smoke pour from Dogbert’s rear fan! Panic gripped me as I dove behind my desk and yanked the power cord. I’ve only seen black smoke come out of a computer twice before. Once when a PSU failed, taking the motherboard with it, and once when I accidentally connected a 110 V computer to a 220 V outlet intended for a British-made single photon counter. The smoke, however, was coming from the top of Dogbert, not the bottom where the PSU lives... I prepared for the worse.
     After opening up Dogbert and choking on the horrid smell of burning PCB and thick smoke pouring from every orifice in poor Dogbert’s shiny Cosmos case I removed the newly minted Raptor to find this:

Holy hole in a donut Batman, the hard drive burst into flames! While focusing on the faint odor of the incense I had lit to combat the vile smell of burning computer-flesh I reassembled Dogbert, though I decided to re-connect the old Raptor--the one that was home to solidus--using the fancy new reinforced cable that came with the new drive. Guess what? Solidus is back to normal, Dogbert is humming away like a champ, and his buffered reads are off the scale. The lesson here--take your own advice--it’s always the cable!