[Techmonkeys]

Ok so I am not after a fix, just to question your hardware minds.

My brothers PC died on him and refused to boot up any more (not even power on). After some testing and trying of things he came to the conclusion it was his mobo that had died. However he used SATA drives in a RAID config, so needed to get another mobo of the same make/model so he could retrieve his data.

Much ebay later and a replacement was sourced, put it in to the machine and Bingo! we have power, shut it down and connect the SATA drives, switch back on and *POP* one hdd goes with a puff of smoke, fraction of a second later and *POP* the second hdd goes with a puff of smoke.

Now my question is this, what could make 2 SATA drives pop one after the other? They had been left in the PC case for about a month while the new mobo was found ordered and fitted.

They were connected to the PSU using standard molex connectors, which is how they had always been and the only thing that changed was the motherboard.

[win2kpro]

The first place to start is testing the power supply to make sure all the output voltages are within tolerances.

If he was using a cheap power supply it is not uncommon for cheap units to over volt.

[Techmonkeys]

Couldn't tell you now what the PSU is, however I dont think it is a cheap one as the machine he built a couple of years back was top spec everything at the time and all was working well until his mobo went.

But it is at least it;s something to check, I will dig out my multi-meter when I get home and see what results we get thanks.

[win2kpro]

You only have 2 connections on SATA drives, power and data. If two drives blew one after another, I don't know anything that would cause that other than a defective power supply.

[FMC-Tech]

It makes perfect sense that it is a power supply. It is most likely what also caused your origianal mobo to fail.