I had 2 HDD, one seagate 200G, and a WD 250G burnt recently. Yes burnt! I could smell the smell of IC chip burnt coming from my external casing. Electrical engineeers will be familiar with this smell .
Anyway with a voltmeter I measured the voltage. It seems that theryre 4 points from the power cable of the ext casing, and the voltage was reversed!!!! 12v and 5 volts was reversed. Of course the IC's on the HDD pcb which only could receive 5 volts got a surge of 12 volts and that only meant meltdown.

Anyway I was really pissed because all the warranty for these brands only offer swap, meaning that its a one for one exchange minus the data. I went around lowyat and asked and theyre were charging at least 1500 ringgit for 200G regardless of the hardisk being used up to its fullest capacity or not.

I found this place on a website through google search http://www.mdr-xp.com/ and they provided data recovery services if it was hardware fault. Well this place is great cause unlike the places in lowyat, he said he could give home user rate rather than corporate rate which was expensive. It was much more reasonable. When I went there, I had lecturers from UM, and staff from companies coming in with their fauly HDD's and other people. He explained to me off the record that these days, HDD are not really built to last. Not suprisingly,he gets a lot of fault repair orders these days

So anyway word of advice is from all this, is dunt get cheap ext casings, cuz u may never know, i was using this casing for more than 2 years already. Be always prepared for data loss, you may be lucky that your HDD may last 10 years or it may not, but always use stuff like NAS with raid1 or do data mirroring on a backup HDD if you really value your data
Cheers

This post has been edited by beatlesalbum: Oct 15 2008, 12:10 PM

BT indirectly kills your HDD because of excessive read and write cycles. I wouldnt say that IT WILL kill, but it will shorten its lifespan because all HDD has a life cycle.

LoL, no way i think unless the excess heat from all your OC is being blown onto the HDD. In fact OCing you RAM and CPU means faster computation of program strings and scripts and also RAM availability meaning less need to access your HDD read write cycles. Still keep safe and mirror your data or use a fileserver or NAS for backup. Investing 1000 bucks(or less) in a NAS would give you a peaceful state of mind with regards to your data safety.
Cheers

I did that once and my HDD started to smell burnt. heh reverse voltage.

I do not know if its too late to answer you but many shops which sell spare parts in Low Yat plaza especially those run by middle east guys buy back these faulty HDDs. Sure, you may not even get 40 percent of market value but instead of disposing it in an un-enviromentally friendly way, you may as well make a buck out of it.
So anyone of you guys who have voided warranty HDD's take note of this.

Sorry, ive done a search on this thread already, so Im gonna ask as a last resort: Any tools to check the physical integrity of the HDD and return a log of the check? Chkdisk of windows doesnt really give you a report, it just checks and repairs. not what i want.
thanks for hearing me out.