Power Surge Kills Hard Drives

David Polanco
A previous resident of Del Rio Texas now living in the San Antonio. Web designer, SEO, and Graphic Artist.

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Power Surge Kills Hard Drives

Jul 24th, 2007 4:21:26 pm - Subscribe
Mood: sad
Music: ATB - You're Not Alone

Recently I experienced a power surge that killed my hard drives, 2 internal hard drives, and 1 external hard drives.

Well first off let me explain what has happened with in the past few weeks. As usual I have been keeping my PC online, only for convenience reasons. If you do not already know the summer of 2007 has been awful on Texas (weather wise) we have experience hard rains, floods, and even lighting strikes in various counties. Well needless to say I must have experience a power surge that came from:

My outlet > To my Power Conductor > Then to My Motherboard > Finally to My Hard Drives.

Needless to say that the motherboard, nor the conductors (wires) fried, but the hard drives did. I experienced clicking with one of my Western Digital 80GB hard drives (C:), no response from the 200GB Maxtor (D:). and again another clicking noise from the Maxtor OneTouch III External Drive (I:).

So thats 3 hard drives, 2 internal, 1 external, and endless amounts of data that has been lost. I have tried data recovery software, but if your device manager in windows will not recognize the drive...well your screwed, unless you send it off to a data recovery lab. Data recovery labs are not cheap. I contacted Maxtor, which is now Seagate and they stated it with be $1800.00 USD to recover the lost data from the hard drive. Even though it was there data that crapped out on me!

Well thats not it, I looked up APC's website in regards to my surge protector and it stated that with my surge protector was covered up to $75,000 on power surges and other harmful events. Well it also stated that one must turn in there warranty cards 10 days after purchase. Well, I did not and I am screwed out of that.

All I have to say about this is lesson learned. I plan on putting in a Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter (GFCI) within my outlet to stop such events from happening again. Who would have thought that 780GB of data would be gone in an instant.

Recommendations

When lighting or various storms occur always unplug your PC from the wall. This will ensure a surge of current though out your PC.

Turn in your warranty cards for surge protectors.

Tweet this entry | 3 Comments | Post a comment

mdeleon - July 24th, 2007
I know how ya feel. I lost a 250gb external hard drive and my 80gb internal hard drive on my macbook recently due to power surges. I looked at data recovery services and I made the decision to replace the hard drives with bigger harddrives for half the amount data recovery would have cost me from somewhere like DriveSavers. Luckily I had a partial backup on a dvd from a few months back, but I still lost months of data and getting all of my apps back was a pain as well and I'm not completely done doing that yet. I took a long hard look at backup and now I keep a local weekly and monthly clone of my internal hard drive automatically backed up on my external 500gb and I am testing out mozy and amazon s3 with jungle disk for weekly remote backups of just my most important data like photos, documents, etc.. so I'll be protected if it happens again. I'm also looking into purchasing an APC Battery Backup. As you can see, I've learned my lesson, but it's been a painful one.

frost - August 04th, 2007
Only worry if you have APC. That is where the failure for David come from.

anonymous - September 03rd, 2007
As far as your warranty, check on how your state handles them. Here in California, we do not have to send in registration/warranty cards in order for a warranty to be covered. You may be able to bypass their 10 day window for registration for your surge protector.

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