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The week a bad power supply took out three machines and taught me to slow down
Last Tuesday I got a call from a small insurance office downtown. They had three workstations that would not boot, and they needed them running by Friday for an audit. I figured it was a simple case of dead drives or a bad update, so I showed up at 8am with my toolkit and a spare SSD. Turns out a cheap power supply in one tower had failed and sent a surge through the shared power strip. It cooked the motherboard on one machine, killed the drive controller on another, and left the third with corrupted boot files. I spent nine hours that day swapping parts and pulling data off the two drives that survived. The good part came Thursday when the office manager handed me a $200 gift card to a local barbecue place on top of my invoice. I still think about how one $40 power supply cost them nearly $1,400 in parts and labor. Has anyone else run into a surge that took out more than one machine at a time?
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harris.dakota11d ago
That line about a $40 power supply costing them $1,400 hits hard. Cheap PSUs are the worst because they fail quiet and take everything down with them. I had a client years back with a similar mess, one bad unit fried two towers on the same strip plus a printer. Now I always tell people to put a decent surge protector on each machine, not one strip for the whole row. Shared power is just asking for a chain reaction.
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