Attack of the Killer Hard Drive

We had the sound card go out on a Dell motherboard. After replacing it, and after a few days of use, all of a sudden smoke starts coming out of the Dell Optiplex 745. Dell said they would ship us some parts and had us swap the hard drive into another Optiplex so the user could keep working and the drive smoked it! We now have 2 dead Optiplexs and one killer drive.

So we wouldn't lose any data, we hooked the "killer drive" to a USB interface to copy some data off and, man, it really started making the external power supply squeal!

So, it looks like our Seagate ST380013AS will be going off to the data recovery center to be rebuilt while we wait for Dell to send 2 new systems. I smell a class action lawsuit (or it could just be the smell of burnt motherboard in the morning!)."

update: We bought some "tamper resistant" screw driver heads and used one to remove and swap the drive's unremoveable circuit board with a working one's circuit board and recovered the data (saving $300 to $1900 we had been quoted for data recovery services). After we got the important files off, we swapped things back and will be returning the faulty drive (really it was just the drive's circuit board that was the problem) to Dell.