My wife phoned me at work today to tell me that the computer was on fire! Luckily she was working at home for the day or goodness knows what could have happened. She smartly just disconnected the power supply at the wall and left it alone.

It turns out that it was the connector between one of the hard drives and the power supply. The SATA connection to the HDD had melted and started smoking. It looked very like this (found on another site since I didn’t take any pics):

I have no idea why it happened but some googling it turns out that it may have been the fault of the molex to SATA connector that I was using. A batch of similar connectors were factory recalled recently, I may have one of those. I think I’ll be double checking what molex <> SATA connectors are in use in my house and replacing them with good quality ones.

I managed to scrape away most of the burnt plastic from the drive and plugged it in using a different connector. I don’t want to use the drive in case it is a drive error but wanted to plug it in long enough to get the data safely off it.

I accessed the NAS and made sure all my backup were up to date. Then run the commands to remove this drive from the LVM. I’ll get a replacement and put it in later this week. I’ve previously written about how to  do that here.

I also have my NAS mounted on a metal shelving unit from IKEA. I don’t think this is an issue since I have separated the parts fro the metal while mounting but I’ll buy a cheap case to put it all in while I’m at it in case that was the cause.