macpro burning through hard drives -- ? video card pulling too much power?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2019, Ken Cunningham wrote:

> Thanks to everyone for your comments, online and offline.

Not a problem - we're all here to help each other :-)

> Consensus seems to be that this was a 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 coincidence 
> rather than a power issue.

Yep; as one with an electronics background, I simply cannot envisage how 
that would happen, unless you has a really Really REALLY dud device.  The 
only other possibility is that your PS spiked under the load, and did not 
crow-bar[*] in time.

Doesn't even have to be 12 volts either; 5 volts on a 3.3 rail will kill 
anything on it, unless they're protected (hint: cheap devices are cheap 
for a reason; there is some really dangerous mains-powered stuff coming 
out of China, for example, that simply would not pass Australian laws, but 
the appropriate logos are easy to print, such as the CE-tick).

> I have ordered four more USB 4TB backup external hard drives. I believe 
> I will go with all SSD internal drives from now on.

I'm still not comfortable with SSDs that cannot tell you their health 
status until they finally run out of spare blocks...

What's the state of the art here?  Until SSDs report their health in a 
SMART way, I think I'll stick with spinning rust and put up with the seek 
and rotational delays (and the odd head-crash - not very pretty, as that 
was a poor time to find out that my supplier-supplied backup software 
wasn't working).

[*]
Crow-bar protection?  It means pretty much what it implies: if the PS goes 
over-voltage then you get the equivalent of dropping a crow-bar across its 
output rails (and you then hope that the fuse blows first before the Zener 
diode does)...

-- Dave