Came home today and powered up my gaming PC. Pressed the button, nothing happened. Oh boy, more mysterious problems huh? I used my old-school computer power controller to cycle power to it and try again. It's this thing, but color-matched black with the computer for l33tness:
This time when I press the power button, through the case-side window, I see sparks flying and the orange glow of what looks like berkeleyING FIRE inside the case. Now the power controller really comes in handy and I cut power to the computer real quick, luckily the glow disappears.
The fire was coming from a removable bay in the case holding two 10krpm drives in a RAID0 array and an SSD. I figure it's one of the power-guzzling things with moving parts that shot fire so I unplug the hard drives and try again, so far so good, I'm posting from it now. That bay does have a burnt smell. I also happened to have some powder-type ABC extinguishers nearby, but knowing that they work by destroying the fuel so that the fire can't feed on it, that would've been a hard choice to use. The hard drives hold most of the games and some bulk storage data and are backed up, no big deal there, except now's a bad time for me to have to buy some kind of high-performance replacement storage system.
