Almost fried a server rack in Tulsa last week

I was swapping out a PSU on a Dell R730 and forgot to check if the backup battery was still connected. Sparks flew and it tripped the whole breaker for the floor. Has anyone else had a close call with hot-swap components acting weird?

3 comments

3 Comments

skyler_kelly692d ago

yall keep talking about hot swap drives and psu's but nobody mentioned the grounding. i seen a rack in phoenix where they used a regular power strip instead of a proper pdu and the ground wire was just floating. every time someone swapped a component it sent little spikes through the whole rack. took weeks to figure out why drives kept dropping offline. turned out the whole rack chassis was acting like a giant antenna for stray voltage.

samreed2d ago

Whoa, that Tulsa story is wild. But I gotta gently push back on one thing - hot swap doesn't mean you can be careless with batteries. @jennybailey, your buddy Mike's Supermicro story is a perfect example. I've seen guys treat hot swap like it's magic, but the backplane can still arc if there's a short or if the tray isn't seated right. I fried a SATA connector once on a Dell because a stray piece of metal bridging the pins. You always gotta check the physical condition first, especially on older hardware where the clips get loose. That burnt smell in the room is the worst, it lingers for days.

jennybailey2d ago

My buddy Mike actually had a similar thing happen with a Supermicro chassis in Dallas last year. He was hot-swapping a drive tray and somehow the backplane shorted out, sent a spike through the whole storage shelf. The entire row of servers went dark and he said the smell of burnt metal filled the room for like 10 minutes lol. The worst part was the data center manager made him fill out a whole incident report with the safety team. He still jokes about it but I swear he checks every connection twice now before touching anything hot-swap.