Your worst build, experiment, or design failure?

[Sarra]

I don't know why, but I keep thinking back to a horrible failure of yesteryear lately, and I'm curious if anyone else has done anything similar...

 

Back during the Socket A days, I had a Shuttle SFF PC. It was small, quiet, and worked really well. The only downside is that it had room for one harddrive, and I had several. I had an 80GB drive for windows, and several 500gb drives for everything else.

 

So, I found a cheap SFF case, and I modded it to fit my HDD's. All of them. Then, I ran eSATA cables from my Shuttle case to the HDD enclosure. Edit: I also modded a PSU to power the drives, with a switch, and that worked just fine. Kinda wish I had kept the case and PSU, and found a different solution for DAS data management.

 

eSATA was bad. REALLY bad. I corrupted almost all of my crap, games, Windows, everything. o.x It was such a nightmare.

[Man]

Well, I once removed the HSF from my Celeron 300 machine because the fan noise was driving me nuts. 

 

Turned out to be a bad idea!

 

Old CPUs didn't have a safety power cut-off feature... or whatever it's called. Learnt the hard way. 

 

I was only 13, mind you. Sh!t happens when you're 13!

[Sarra]

1 minute ago, Man said:

Well, I once removed the HSF from my Celeron 300 machine because the fan noise was driving me nuts. 

 

Turned out to be a bad idea!

 

Old CPUs didn't have a safety power cut-off feature... or whatever it's called. Learnt the hard way. 

 

I was only 13, mind you. Sh!t happens when you're 13!

One of my classmates in a computer tech class got ahold of an old Pentium CPU... And a lamp cord. I was tasked with distracting the teacher, while said lamp cord was soldered to the CPU.

 

Made an amazing heater for a few minutes. Left burnt pin marks on the particleboard table top, so we went to flip it over, and there were already burn marks on the other side of the particle board...

 

That class was epic fun.