The 'pro' supplies used in high end boxes have serious 'crowbar' SCRs on
their outputs to prevent this sort of thing from happening. When you have $10k
of high performance server/hard drives, you don't worry about $10 of fail-safe
parts.

I suppose you could make up a poor-man's-crowbar with some high wattage
zeners rated at a half volt about the supply values (notably the 5V and 12V rails).
If the supply goes berserk, the zeners clamp and blow the primary fuse.
Wire it up to an old hard drive connector (or Y cable) for easy installation.
Now that you've made me think about it, I'll be doing this tomorrow.

I once has a power supply where the 5V & 12V leads for a drive were reversed.
Brand new SCSI HD and the 'magic smoke' came out the first time I powered it
up. The dealer refused to replace the fried drive since "you should have
checked that the connectors were OK". I certainly check now.  I also highly
UNrecommend them to anyone who asks. In the end they lost a lot more that
the replacement cost of the drive.

A relatively cheap and quick way to do backups is to purchase a second
BIG hard drive in removable drive bay. It is used ONLY for backups.
You pull it out of the system and take it off site once you've done the backup.
With two drives it's even more reliable. You take one home with you, and
bring the alternate in to work the next day (or week).

Robert

Bob Blick wrote:
>
> > I like mirrored drives a heck of a lot better.  I've had tape media problems
> > as well as other (ahem, "operator headspace") issues.  I also never need to
> > remember to swap out a mirror drive...  but I could if I needed off-site
> > backup storage.
>
> Off-site's not a bad idea. This all hits very close to home. The power
> supply in my office computer decided to go ballistic and uncontrolled last
> week. The fans sounded like jet engines, and almost masked the popping
> sounds of chips losing their epoxy. Smoke poured out, the power switch(ATX
> soft power, ya know) did nothing.
>
> Everything was toast. The hard drive would not spin. I got an identical
> new drive and swapped boards, now it spun up fine, but just went
> clack-clack. I guess the internal head electronics was toast. Estimate
> from Drivesavers for their "economy" service was $1900 to recover the
> data. Luckily I was well backed up.
>
> Except now I have to make friends with a new computer.
>
> Networked backups a good idea, off-site backups even better! I've never
> heard of this happening before, but I'm paranoid now.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bob

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