[colug-432] What causes electronics to expire?

[Thomas Cranston]

Bad Capacitors?

I have had the same experience with optical drives going south. I don't use
them much, so don't understand why they go bad. Somebody told me that their
lazer light is on all the time the computer is on whether they are being
used or not, and that much on time burns them out. I now have an external
DVD drive that I only plug into the power and the computer if I am using it.

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Joshua Kramer <joskra42.list at gmail.com>wrote:

> So as it turns out, the external enclosure in which I had my 500GB drive,
> is flaky.
>
> I put the new 1TB drive in this enclosure to use as a backup drive.  I put
> the old 500GB drive (that was giving me "can't read sector" I/O errors) on
> a small SATA-USB adapter I had.  When I started copying from the old to the
> new, the new 1TB drive was giving all kinds of I/O errors.
>
> I hung the 500GB drive off of an internal SATA interface of my PC, and I
> connected the 1TB drive to the SATA-USB adapter.  Now, I am copying things
> over with no I/O errors.
>
> What's interesting is, for the past 18 months or so I've kept this
> enclosure in a cool, dark closet... and I've only moved it once every 1-2
> weeks to do backups.  And I only plug it into a UPS-protected outlet.
>
> So I wonder what, barring an external physical event, causes a transistor
> or two to work one day, and then the next, say, "you know what?  I've had
> enough on/off cycles in my lifetime, I quit!"
>
> Cheers,
> -JK
>
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