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September 20, 2007
The Magic, Black Smoke
As you probably know just about everything electronic works the way it does due to the containment of magic, black smoke. You've likely noticed that days and days and days and months and years will pass in which you'll be able to use something electronic and then one day you'll turn it on, a puff of smoke will come out, and it no longer works. Whatever it was that was in charge of containing the magic black smoke within your electronic gizmo has failed, the black smoke has escaped, and the gizmo is likely useless to you now. (This normally happens when you need it most.)
Toasters (and toaster ovens) may be the exception here though it should be noted that magic black smoke often has an acrid smell while toaster black smoke often smells like burnt bread.
When I was in England I got a call from a coworker who was trying to troubleshoot something at work. During the course of the conversation he said, "Smoke is coming out of the monitor." This is hardly ever good as even really good girl-on-girl porn is rarely able to make smoke come out of a monitor. I was familiar with the monitor in question — it was on its last legs which was why I had it (IT gets all the crap) though I couldn't believe my bad luck that it had slipped into total failure catch on fire mode while I was on vacation. As it happened it just smoked enough to distort the display (I've since replaced the monitor with a piece-of-crap LCD that had been discarded due to its funky display properties.).
This morning I took an external USB drive enclosure and plugged my backup drive into it. I put power to it and noticed the little power LED hadn't lit up. I picked the unit up in my hand and it looked like there might be magic black smoke coming out of the bottom of it. Well, actually magic gray smoke which is what made the problem so hard to diagnose; the enclosure is gray and I wasn't sure if the wispy looking stuff was smoke or a reflection of something off the bottom of the enclosure.
Aside from the burnt bread example above, hustling to undo whatever it is that caused the smoke release really never helps. That is, removing power from the enclosure wasn't likely to save anything enclosure-wise, however it might have kept the problem from spreading to the notebook computer everything was plugged into. And the point is… I knew I was screwed, but I unhooked everything in pretty short order.
The sniff test has verified that item I burned up is the external enclosure and (probably not also) the drive.
Rats.
Posted by delmer at September 20, 2007 7:36 AM
Comments
So, basically, you're having a good day then?
Posted by: Pen at September 20, 2007 12:19 PM
Absolutely! He didn't let the magic smoke out of MY hard drive.
Posted by: Icy Mt. at September 20, 2007 1:05 PM
all units that do use too much electricity will burn out. Thats build in nowadays bij enviroment friendly Taiwanese to make your electicity bill lower. Be gratefull for that.
Posted by: Jack at September 21, 2007 8:40 AM
Dude I have a great letting the smoke out story! I was working on our "vehicle" project at the garage and had just put a new motor in it. This was the "manufactures" motor so it was the only one. We had two weeks to put it in, but waited until two days left to do the work. So it's about 6:30pm I hooked up the starter wires, White with Red stripe to 12V, White with Black stripe to ground. Makes sense right?? WRONG! as soon as I tried to start it I heard this hissing sound and it looked like someone set a smoke bomb off. The "oh shit" dance ensued along with a lot of ***k, ***k screaming at my stupidity. I unplugged it and took the starter circuit apart. I basically turned all the wire insulation to carbon, it was flaking off. I rewired all of it, made a quick prayer to ALLAH and turned the switch. Thank god it started.
Sorry for the length.
Posted by: mikeo at September 21, 2007 8:25 PM