Power supply component protection

[HitachiRocks]

Hello,
I noticed one of the fans in my Norco case wasn't spinning. I removed the fan and noticed that one of the pins on the fan mount was bent - so I stupidly took insulated tweezers and tried to correct the pin placement. There was a small spark and the computer restart immediately, I heard the power supply switch off and on and the motherboard light cycled. I pulled one of the hard drives immediately and out of the 24 it worked fine. Everything works perfectly right now, but did I damage anything? The fan was connected via 2pin molex and a SATA - molex adapter via a Corsair HX70 power supply.
Thanks.

 

[edogawa]

If everything is currently now working just fine I wouldn't worry.

I don't mean to be rude, but that was really stupid and dangerous; always power off the PC and unplug it when your working inside it.

 

[scottiemedic]

It's fine, I've shorted molex connectors accidentally inserting them into older IDE hard drives. COULD HAVE something happened? Yes. Did it? Probably not, especially if it's running fine. It would have fried the PSU/mobo first/second. Since those are running, you're silver (instead of golden) ;-)

 

[HitachiRocks]

Thanks for your reply! I am just extremely concerned as this is going to run 24/7 and has 24 hard drives in it... When I am done with it, it's going into a small business that needs it running 24/7

 

[edogawa]

Thanks for your reply! I am just extremely concerned as this is going to run 24/7 and has 24 hard drives in it... When I am done with it, it's going into a small business that needs it running 24/7

It will be fine, just leave it running 24\7 for a few days before it goes into use if it makes you comfortable.

24 drives? That's pretty crazy! What kind of business is this being used for?

 

[InvalidError]

Look at it this way: now you know that the PSU's over-current protection appears to be working fine since it successfully prevented the PSU from either blowing itself up or blowing up something else.

A properly designed and working over-current protection should trip before the current has a chance to rise high enough to cause remotely significant damage tothe PSU. You would probably need to repeat the 'test' hundreds if not thousands of times to get a catastrophic failure of some sort.