Vantec Rheobus that Blew Up!!!

[ST|FFY]

i have a vantec rheobus and today i go to push the power button on my computer, as i do so i hear a loud *BOOM* followed by a burning smell

i open up my case to look for smoke and whatnot but i see nothing...i look around nothing weird, so i go and power on my computer again and it works fine

little bit of using and i see that some of my fans are not working -->wtf
so i check my rheobus and see that one of the channels as been blown up a little (dont have digi cam to show)
so there goes that rheobus, im getting the sunbeam one in a few days
hopefully that one will NOT blow up

oh yea, so anyone know what actually happend?

 

[AR]

Originally posted by ST|FFY
i have a vantec rheobus and today i go to push the power button on my computer, as i do so i hear a loud *BOOM* followed by a burning smell

i open up my case to look for smoke and whatnot but i see nothing...i look around nothing weird, so i go and power on my computer again and it works fine

little bit of using and i see that some of my fans are not working -->wtf
so i check my rheobus and see that one of the channels as been blown up a little (dont have digi cam to show)
so there goes that rheobus, im getting the sunbeam one in a few days
hopefully that one will NOT blow up

oh yea, so anyone know what actually happend?

Wow. Odd. Maybe somehow some water dropped on it while it was off. . . or something. I picked up one cheap @ the Xoxide sale a while back (~$9), and it works great so far even though they sent me the wrong type of fan connectors -- ha. Sunbeam is a good way to go though, heard more complimentary things about them vs. the Nexus.

 

[ST|FFY]

yea, freaked the hell out of me when i heard it

 

[leukotriene]

If you had multiple fans connected to a single "channel" and had it turned down pretty low, the excess power basically gets dissipated as heat.
If there's too much wattage on one particular channel the variable resistor (or transistor or whatnot) will be getting very hot, and could concievably blow or start to smoke.

IIRC, Dansdata had an article about this kind of thing. Maybe I'll look for it later.

edit: Yeah, I found it.

I tested the GTR controller with a couple of fans which each have roughly seven watt nominal power. Nominal power is usually how much a fan draws when it's spinning up; its run power will generally be lower.

With a Y.S. Tech nominal 7.2 watt fan, a thermal probe expertly clothes-pegged to the metal back face of one of the transistors read 39°C, with an ambient temperature of 16°C, with the fan at full power. Winding the fan down to minimum speed kicked the temperature up fast; it hit 90°C in less than 40 seconds, at which point the rate of climb wasn't slowing down much. I terminated the experiment there. The magic smoke would definitely have escaped from the transistor after less than another minute.

When powering a nominal-2.9-watt Sunon fan, which is a good middle-of-the-road medium power case fan, the probe on the transistor stabilised at 69°C, 52 degrees above ambient. That's rather warm, but perfectly safe; the maximum operating temperature for these transistors is likely to be up around 150°C, at which point the thermal probe (not in terribly good thermal contact with the chip package) would probably be reading 130 degrees or so.

So this "ten watt per channel" controller is actually good for maybe four watts per channel. With a bit of a breeze over it - which it won't get, in many 3.5 inch drive bays - it could probably do five just fine. And the less you turn your fans down, the more power capacity the controller has; you could run a twenty watt fan from it with no trouble, as long as you hardly turned it down at all!

 

[ST|FFY]

so dont turn down fans too much?
awwwww