Stress Testing Products
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Hard Drive
We started by plugging this guy in and thrashing it around as much as possible. This made some funky sounds and provided for ample entertainment as the forces from the spinning hard drive are quite impressive.
After fiddling around with it, we got down to business. We pulled out a hammer, and not just a warranty mallot, as described in the
Bastard Operator from Hell, but a standard carpenters hammer. Leaving the hard drive plugged in, we started to hit the hard drive from both sides. Once the hard drive sounded like it was no longer spinning, we decided to unplug it before we continued our stress testing.
We eventually broke open the case of the hard drive with the hammer revealing the badly damaged platters.
Results: Absolute failure. Unrecoverable data loss. Unsatisfactory final condition.
MotherBoard
This one was fairly straight forward. Take a transformer with 2 wires and see what we can short on a motherboard. Starting out with some chipsets directly, we get a decent amount of smoke. We also managed to get a fair amount of smoke out of the IDE chipset by putting current onto the IDE pins.
As you can see, we did some nice scorching to the circuits on the board as well as to the chipsets. It's amazing how only a single circuit can take out so much. The nerve of it! Finally we went at the soldered on co-processor. We managed to melt some sections of the coprocessor, but we were denied in the smoke department.
Results: Absolute failure. Burning of components. Smoke. Melting chips. Completely unnacceptable handling of slightly increased power to various portions of the board.
Processor
From the motherboard tested above, we have the processor. Using the same style of test, applying voltages to random sets of pins and seeing the results.
Our testing team was quite unhappy with the results, and got quite demoralized. With a lack of signs showing our stress testing, we bailed on this fairly early on. Our biggest accomplishment was to get some of the pins glowing red as seen in the picture.
Results: Assumed Failure. A processor not designed for overclocking getting highly increased voltages through it's pins. No visible signs of destruction except for some bent pins. Assumed internal parts fried, while external casing intact due to red hot pins.
