SATA cable melted. What happened here?

[freedomispopular]

Ok, so I just got a 3 TB Toshiba hard drive. I installed it today. Went into BIOS to make sure it was showing up and it wasn't. Next thing I know there's this funky smell and smoke started coming out of the computer. Opened it up, and both ends of the SATA cable connected to the new hard drive had started melting, and part of the power connector had melted as well. Obviously the hard drive is no good now, and the dual SATA port connector on my motherboard is no good, but thankfully that's all that was damaged.

I pried off the SATA port from the motherboard, and every thing seems to be working fine, except for the obvious fact that I have two fewer SATA ports now.

So any idea what could have gone wrong here? I figured the cable could have been bad, but the power cable had melted some as well, so that makes me think it could have been the hard drive. The SATA cable was one of the originals from my motherboard (Asus M4A79T Deluxe), and I've had no trouble with any of the cables before. I didn't have any extra power connectors so I grabbed one from another power supply (I'm currently working on a build for my brother's birthday) so I guess maybe that could have been a dud? Do you guys think Toshiba will replace the hard drive for me? And since the motherboard got damaged, do you think they'd recompense me for that at all?

This is seriously the first major problem I've had since I built my rig 2 1/2 years ago. I'm just glad it wasn't anything too serious, and I really don't care what happens now as long as the money I spent on the hard drive wasn't a waste.

Some pics.

 

[clutchc]

Without being there to see the situation, it would be hard to say. But I would suspect the drive having some shorts between the data and power wiring. Or possibly the power cable you used had some contacts shorted and when it fried, the data cable did as well. But since both ends of the data cable took the worse damage, I'm leaning towards the problem being in the drive end SATA or the board end SATA.

Have you ever had anything plugged into that particular damaged MB SATA header before? Or was this a first time use for that port?

You'll have to contact Toshiba with the explanation and see what they will do. They may want to be sure it wasn't the board that fried their drive.

Btw, your pics aren't available.

 

[freedomispopular]

Without being there to see the situation, it would be hard to say. But I would suspect the drive having some shorts between the data and power wiring. Or possibly the power cable you used had some contacts shorted and when it fried, the data cable did as well. But since both ends of the data cable took the worse damage, I'm leaning towards the problem being in the drive end SATA or the board end SATA.

Have you ever had anything plugged into that particular damaged MB SATA header before? Or was this a first time use for that port?

You'll have to contact Toshiba with the explanation and see what they will do. They may want to be sure it wasn't the board that fried their drive.

Btw, your pics aren't available.

Yes, I was previously using that port. Meant to put that in the OP as it's pretty pertinent. So I'm thinking it's pretty safe to say that it wasn't a problem on the board side.

And that's weird, the pics are showing up fine for me

 

[clutchc]

The pics are probably in your cache. They show up on your machine anyway. Or it could be Tom's is having issue again.

Yeah, if the SATA header was used before, then I would have to assume the drive was defective.

 

[freedomispopular]

Thanks, that's good to know. I've got the pictures on imgur now. Apparently I can't figure out how to share from Dropbox lol.

 

[clutchc]

Hey. Pics are working.
Wow! That's a first for me. From the looks of the PCB on the HDD, I would say you had a voltage back feed on a ground wire on one of the cables. The burned contacts on the data section of the HDD appear to be the 3 Ground contacts on pins 4,5,6. You can Google the pinout of a typical HDD and see what I mean.

That may not have been the fault of the drive. It may have been a defective cable, or bad manufactured cable end. Somehow one of the power voltages (3V, 5V, or 12V) went to ground at the point of connection. The resulting current may have passed thru the 4,5,6 ground pins but was too much for the data wiring to handle. But it's odd the system didn't shut down when it saw a ground fault.

 

[mikepark]

Ok, so I just got a 3 TB Toshiba hard drive. I installed it today. Went into BIOS to make sure it was showing up and it wasn't. Next thing I know there's this funky smell and smoke started coming out of the computer. Opened it up, and both ends of the SATA cable connected to the new hard drive had started melting, and part of the power connector had melted as well. Obviously the hard drive is no good now, and the dual SATA port connector on my motherboard is no good, but thankfully that's all that was damaged.

I pried off the SATA port from the motherboard, and every thing seems to be working fine, except for the obvious fact that I have two fewer SATA ports now.

So any idea what could have gone wrong here? I figured the cable could have been bad, but the power cable had melted some as well, so that makes me think it could have been the hard drive. The SATA cable was one of the originals from my motherboard (Asus M4A79T Deluxe), and I've had no trouble with any of the cables before. I didn't have any extra power connectors so I grabbed one from another power supply (I'm currently working on a build for my brother's birthday) so I guess maybe that could have been a dud? Do you guys think Toshiba will replace the hard drive for me? And since the motherboard got damaged, do you think they'd recompense me for that at all?

This is seriously the first major problem I've had since I built my rig 2 1/2 years ago. I'm just glad it wasn't anything too serious, and I really don't care what happens now as long as the money I spent on the hard drive wasn't a waste.

Some pics.

Did you get a solution? I have a similar situation. Have replaced cpu fan and motherboard to no avail. Problem is with ANY SATA device (SSD, HDD & DVD).