Didnt not had problems with these components, maybe i buy just the right ones.. *knock* *knock*

I mostly lost HDDs, and mostly second hand ones. One newly bought Quantum 20 GB gone in around 2005, with 7-8 hours of holiday videos and about 3-4.000 family pics. I was just finished cleaning CDRW backup disks of it, and was just started re-backing up that HDD to the same CDs, when it started clicking like crazy and died in just about ten seconds. I still remember how angry I was to myself (and still preserve the disk for a future possible salvage operation).

I also lost a couple of motherboards (most sad one was a FIC 486 VIP IO - my only 486 board on hand), a couple of monitors (a monochrome VGA CRT and a cheapo Samsung LCD), a couple of PSUs (one of them take two HDDs with it - ever seen/heard an exploded cache memory chip?).

At the moment, a couple of my AWE64s have bad memory, but SIMMCONN solved that problem easily. I also throw away many secondhand motherboards, floppy drives (mostly 5.25"), SCSI disks, CD-ROMS, etc. which were problematic/not working at all from the beginning.

Years ago, had a hard drive die very suddenly while making the kind of screeching metal-on-metal sound you'd expect from rusty brakes.

After opening the drive to figure out what the hell that was, I found out one of the read/write heads somehow tore itself off and got jammed between the top platter and the inside of the drive lid. Plenty of metal shavings.

Maxtor Diamondmaxes from 2000 and Seagate Barracudas from 2008 are pretty bad as well.

IBM machines don't seem to have a long life cycle in my possesion for some reason. PS/1 and Aptiva have hit the skip in the last 12 months. Salvaged what I could.

My one working 386DX motherboard. 🙁

Lots of hard drives of course, but most of those were gradual old age situations.
The most sudden was a Maxtor 30GB. It was maybe 1yr old and working fine (as far as I knew), then suddenly the computer locked up and the hard drive was clicking infinitely. That's all it ever did after that.
I lost a lot of data in that failure, including some source code which really depressed me. That's when I learned my lesson about backups.

Had a cheap generic 32MB PC100 DIMM turn up dead in a working system. I had never touched it.

Between myself and family I've had a few video card failures. A hot running 9800GT started artifacting, Radeon 9600XT fan seized, and Ti4200 died from heatsink mounting peg failure.

The cherry picked Asus P2B-F that I was once running as my main desktop turned up dead when I pulled it out of storage a couple years ago. I still have it, hoping I'll come up with some resolution, but it doesn't POST at all. I had retained it out of numerous P2B/P3B boards due to how well it overclocked, so I ran it hard when it was running. It didn't die in use though, just turned up dead after being stored.

I've had lots of problems with flash memory devices turning up corrupt. They quote some ridiculous endurance specs but I call them liars.

My monitor died of bad caps, it was an easy fix though.

Most recently, my SB32 CT3600 won't detect and seems to be dead to the world. I'm pretty certain that one really is dead, because my CT2760 works perfectly in the same machine without any changes. These cards can trick you though, so I continue to hold on to them in case it's user error. I had the same problem with my CT3990, but I need to try it again because that was years ago.

Over the years the components that have failed me the most are without a doubt CD-ROM and hard disk drives. Other than that only PSUs have failed spontaneously, but a lot less than the other two types of components.

Hard drives and Optical Drives would take the top of the list for me.
Optical drives that see very heavy use, rarely last more then a year for me, and Hard drives are just random, 1 day to 20 years+.
Floppy drives keep on trucking till they get to coated with dust, and usually can be restored just by a good cleaning + oiling,
only had a few ever fail completely.

2x Savage 2000.

2 Socket 7, 1 Slot 1 and 1 Socket A motherboards (were fully fonctionnal and carefully stored in anti-static bags and discharged from static electricity before using them) that appeared stone dead some months to one year after storage 😐
When it's not basic electronic components/short-circuit/bad contacts/solders/bios/memory/cpu/psu/cards related you know you're screwed... 😵
Sort of things that only happen when you need it to test new acquired processors for benchmarks and comparisons... well, f*** ! 🤣

At Least 2 +-12 years old ATX PSU (at that time) died right at the computer power-up (with no apparent leaking caps or visible signs of damaged components apart the fuse 😒 )
A trustly 520W Hiper PSU that I used for 9 years with my 4 main gaming rig (A64 4000+ 7800 GTX on a Asus a8n-Sli Deluxe MB/ Opteron 146 o/c @ FX-57 8800 GTS 640 on a DFI nf4 Ultra-D MB / E6750 o/c @ 3.6 HD 3870 and finally a Q6600 o/c for 3 months on a Gigabyte p35 ds3 ...
I immediatly recognized the strong smell of fried hardware after powering up the computer : RIP 😢 ....

A dozen of Maxtor IDE HDD... yep that's not a myth 😈 and not a great loss after all 🤣
A 250 GB SATA II Seagate in 2009 and a 500 GB SATA II WD in 2012 that were used as main HDD's (not recognized by the BIOS after years of use... not due to o/c or not directly, because PCI-e bus frequency was locked at 100 Mhz all that time 😒 ) Well... ARRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!!!

A VLB video card (Cirrus Logic GD5428 based) during a ROTT gaming session 😒 the monitor started to blink and then...blank screen "no signal" 😵

A 3DFX Voodoo 1 that ceased to be recognized by the system (forcing its initialisation with the 3dfx variables used for the Tomb Raider 3DFX patch and trying to play some 3DFX DOS GAMES only showed garbled screen with 90% of black mapped textures and the rest was filled with yellow and pink...) 😒

A bunch of FDD and CD/DVD Combo/Rewriter (cleaning hasn't helped 🤣)

Fortunately all my precious and rarer pieces of hardware are still working fine 🤣 for now... 😐

I have to say I've received quite a few dead optical drives over the years, but never had a good one fail on me.

I guess the moral of all these stories is to use the hell out of your hardware today, because it could be dead tomorrow! Better to wear out than to rust out, as they say.

lazibayer wrote:

It just happened today. My GA-5SMM died this morning. PSU fan spins, hard drive spins, but no CPU fan spin, no video, no nothing. Can't believe it. Can't find any visual damage. Swapped everything and everything works except the motherboard. 😵

It revived!
The previous owner might have spilled some beverage on the corner of the board and stained two of the BIOS's pins and sockets. Rust was growing all over the years and finally clogged the connection. I cleared the mess and polished the metal and the board is back to life.

Good to hear 😁

From the specs it looks like a nice motherboard.

kixs wrote:

Good to hear 😁

From the specs it looks like a nice motherboard.

I like the board for its 1/4 PCI divider so no worries about 133FSB, and the support for 1.3V core voltage.
I don't like the its ram performance. At 133FSB it scores lower than Aladdin V at 100FSB, but slightly higher than P5S-VM with the same chipset.

Forgot to mention the strangest most recent hard drive death.
I had a pair of Seagate 7200.11 500GB drives affected by the "BSY" firmware bug. They both had low hours, something like 4K for one and 6K for the other. I was able to fix both of them and update the firmware so the problem wouldn't happen again. One of them was put into service and still works fine.
The other drive was stored in a foam container with an antistatic bag. When I took it out to use 6 months later, it slowed the computer to a crawl and reported a ton of bad sectors everywhere. Even the name of the drive wasn't reading correctly, it was full of corrupt characters. I've since tried reflashing the drive with a couple different firmwares but nothing makes any difference. Seems electronic death paid a visit while it was just sitting there in a box.

Just remembered I used to have a blueberry iMac G3 rev. D (the 333MHz variant, tray-loading) that died one day. To this day, I still don't know what happened to it. While I was using it, the CRT started spazzing out, which was something that it was doing over the past couple weeks or so, but, on the day that it died, it started really spazzing out, eventually going totally blank and causing the system to reboot endlessly. My guess is that the CRT or something fried, since it was also making these sharp "shock" noises every time the display spazzed out.

Also used to have an LC II that suddenly wouldn't turn on one day. Dunno what happened. Both machines would eventually get scrapped, and both came from when I used to collect Apple stuff (in addition to PC stuff, of course). Still have a few vintage Apple/Macintosh systems kicking around, such as a pair of SE's that originally came from my dad's place of work, and a complete IIgs that I trashpicked a couple years ago.

Had a Celeron 366MHz die on me a few months ago.
Piece of garbage won't be missed.