Sources of hardware damage

This is a "paranoia thread" of a noob, after having to replace a defective hdd

Can hardware be damaged from a non-physical cause?

 

yes, mostly with the help of electricity being present at the wrong place

 

Or a particularly powerful magnet.

 

Also brown outs or spikes. Non sanctioned or malfuntioning power bricks can cause issues as well, while these can be unseen problems they are a physical one...............

 

Or just unclean power overall. In general, you want as stable of a voltage and current as possible.

 

Drive firmware corruption?

 

Sometimes it just fails due to manufacturing defects (i.e. bad motor, bad controller chips etc.). Those are totally invisible and doesn't require any physical cause.


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stable voltage yes, but what do you mean by stable current .. LOL

 

Flashing a corrupted bios, or having a flash interrupted, though these can be recovered if you identify them by manually flashing the chip.

 

You don't want the amperage to be all over the place. Because voltage is tied to amperage via V = IR, I figured it'd be worth mentioning since the only way to change voltage would be to change current (resistance would stay the same).

 

Poor solder bump? (i.e. NVIDIA G84/G86)

 

As far as a hard drive is concerned, I think a defect like that would probably cause the drive to explode

 

That's just plain stupid...

A computer does not behave like a simple resistor having constant ohm value. Depending on what your computer does, the current fluctuates constantly. For example a mobile CPU can change its power between 5-45Watts depending on the load.


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Unclean power can only come from an unclean power brick unless there are some major power fluctuations, since laptop adapters are regulated and will still output ~19v when given an input of anywhere from 100-240v

Of course I don't know what would happen with power below 100v, I wish they had more/better circuitry for this... assuming that's what a "brown out" is.

Which brings me to an interesting question for the pros: Can you damage your hardware by unplugging an adapter from the wall while its still plugged into your computer?

 

something tells me that you dont know what you're talking about.

no, it will be fine. We've done it numerous times.

if you input below 100V then your power supply will not be able to do 19V output but rather less. That, if it works at all.

but just to let you all know, those power supplies are pretty sophisticated devices. They are all stabilized impulse power supplies and that's why those are so small and light. If you had to output what you get from a computer adapter with regular transformer then you'll be surprised how big and heavy that one will be .. hehehe.

 

But current has nothing to do with the charger and the laptop will draw whatever current it needs at any given time.