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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/sgircys on 2024-03-19 15:26:06.
After an extremely frustrating day of troubleshooting, I figured I'd share my story on here as a word of caution to anyone else out there who might be in the same, rare situation that I found myself in yesterday.
For a bit of backstory - I built a new PC about a year ago which included a new EVGA GQ 1000w Gold power supply. Unfortunately, as soon as I booted up the PC for the first time, I knew there was something wrong with the power supply. The coil whine was horrible; worse than anything I had ever heard from any other PC in the past. I sent it (at my own expense) to EVGA under warranty as it was brand new. As per their instructions, I sent only the power supply unit itself and no cables. They were very clear in their instructions - "Keep all accessories as you will only be receiving a power supply in return." No problem. I set the aside for when I would get the power supply back from them. In the meantime, I re-used my older Corsair power supply as it got the job done. A few weeks later, I received the RMA'd power supply from EVGA, but life got in the way so it sat in the box until yesterday, when my Corsair unit started getting noisy enough to really bug me.
I pulled the Corsair out, along with all of its cables as I am very aware you cannot mix power supply cables. Then I opened up the EVGA box and grabbed the cables that go along with it, which I had set aside and labelled previously. I plugged everything in and tried to boot up the PC with no luck. Only a click, which I figured might be an overload protection circuit. I immediately had to double check to see if I mixed any cables somehow, but everything was correct and only the EVGA GQ cables (that came with the power supply) were used. As the first step of troubleshooting, I disconnected the SATA power from my SATA hard drives. And just like that, it booted up completely fine. Once I had isolated that the SATA power was the issue, I decided to check the voltages with a multimeter. To my surprise, they were all completely wrong. 12V where 3V was supposed to be, nothing where 5V was supposed to be, and so on. I tried a different SATA power cable from the same, matching set and it was the exact same.
At this point, I called EVGA. To their credit, I was able to speak with someone in a matter of minutes, which can't be said for most manufacturers. After explaining the situation, and the tech pulling up my RMA file, he knew what the problem was. He notified me that "At some point, the pin layout of these power supplies was changed". I was never told this when I received my power supply back from warranty, and clearly my cables were incompatible with the power supply now - with no way of knowing other than by checking with a multimeter. The tech told me that he believed it was only the SATA power that was changed, which would make sense as my PC was able to boot just fine with the SATA power disconnected from the drives. He said he was sending me a new set of cables and that would fix the issue. While that should be the case, what a horrible decision to change a power supply pin layout within the same product (with the only way to know being manufacturing date?) with absolutely no notice. And by following EVGA's protocol of not sending in power supply cables during a warranty claim, you're essentially screwed. I thanked the technician for his help and acknowledged that it wasn't his fault, personally, that this happened and that I'll wait for the new cables to arrive - once again using my old Corsair in the meantime.
After removing the EVGA and putting the Corsair back in, once again, the problem really showed itself. All of my SATA drives were gone. They were fried. 22TB of storage gone. I double and triple checked, using a different PC as the test PC with the drives even, but they were dead. Thankfully, I do have cloud backups, but my wife and I did both lose our entire day's work as the most recent backup was from the morning. I did contact EVGA again and spoke to another technician who said he will be speaking to his manager about this tomorrow to see what they can do about this situation. As other people have said, EVGA's customer service is quite good and I do appreciate that. Hopefully they're able to help me by fixing my situation, but this could still be a serious problem for other people.
TLDR : EVGA decided to change their SATA power cable pin layout on the GQ power supply and you'd have no way of knowing without checking the pins with a multimeter. And they can, and do fry hard drives.
