There goes a part of my music collection...well, at least for awhile.

But hey, who would have thought that a faulty Y-shaped MOLEX power splitter cable could manage to fry the SMOOTH IC on the PCB?
Well, it has taught me a good lesson for sure! (And don't get me started about that godawful smell...) And next time, before using these weird splitting constructions, I will first test with an IDE or very old SATA drive (no matter if I have to buy me one!) as a pseudo-load to check if the motor spins up the correct way and no hacking noise is audible. And *IF* I get things shorted, it will be a $10 junk drive I've bricked. *shrug*

Unfortunately, it happened the other way round: not until after frying my drive (a WD1001FALS I TB one ), I got aware of the fact that there must be something wrong with the voltage feed.
And there was!!
From the side of the power supply (female), the plug's four tiny pipes were way too open and not tight enough; from the (male) side of the Y cable, the pins had to be treated with a 1.0mm screwdriver or a tiny knife so that they diverge more and sit more tightly in the holes.
YAY, that fixed it!! But too late for the WDC drive.

But I might have saved myself from this trouble if I had acquired an Y-splitter cable of a higher quality in the first place.
Alas, there are not many around AFAICS, just those $5 molex ones with the creamy-white connectors.
But now I know they're pure junk, and sometimes even need manual treatment to work 100% reliably. Plus, some of those seem to be fractions of an inch too THICK, making it an utter nightmare to get these out of the HDD's 4-pin molex receptacle again (*shakeee* *rockeee* *gnnnnnhhh*)

Would be interesting to know whether some of you guys have ever managed to kill their drive the same way by a faulty power connection. (Voltages from power supply's side were perfect, multimeter-proved)

Are you certain that the connectors haven't been mis-wired? Make sure that the +5V and +12V wires haven't been crossed.

Catastrophic failures in Western Digital PCBs:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... 119&p=5033

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I am. And I did make myself sure of that.
Plus, the "Y" cables were "from factory", and AS-IS, that means I didn't solder anything in there myself or so.

Perhaps the behavior is different if one of the two black GND wires has no connection at all...
Again: even with my (now fixed) cables I might easily brick the next testing victim by simply simulating a bad connection, i. e. by deliberately making a skew connection so that the connectors are not attached in parallel, but one being off by a small angle (~10 degrees).

So the basic problem seems to be that the drive's PCB might get totally wonky if there is only ONE of the two voltages supplied(?!)
Anyways, it is logical what you said: that the +12V wire must have magically found a way to feed the +5V side and bomb its full +12V DC into the SMOOTH IC, which killed it.

P.S. Come to think of it, the Lounge may also be a good place for this thread. Just spotted this too late.
Damn, I'm "too late" a second time. I'm getting old. (But the first time, things were not really visual - rather related to one's nose, perceiving that nasty smell )