We were recently called to a Windows 2012 server fire. The customer had called us and stated there was blue smoke coming from their server. I instructed them to unplug the unit and I headed to their location. Upon arrival we opened the case and pulled one of the three Western Digital drives, here’s the photo:
As you can see, the sata power connector had caught fire at the point where it interfaces to the circuit board. We been doing service calls for over 25 years and we have never seen a hard drive in this condition. The power supply tested good, but was replaced of course. Since this was a mirror drive after replacing the components the system booted and the customer was back online within the hour with no data loss. At this time we installed Carbonite for an offsite cloud backup in case it happens again.
