"I plugged the HDD and DVD drive into the 12V PCI-E power ports rather than the 5V ones"
I call bullshit. I hate to do it, but I call it. Unless there is a picture of the aftermath, I'm not going to believe it. Even if you assume he wired up his own connector, somehow ignored the fact that the red wire was connected to a yellow one, and got it to spin up: You have to remember that a HDD is encased in metal. The platters are NOT going to blow through it.
This story is less believable than the heat stroke one. They are funny anecdotes, but don't have a shred of truth in them.
I think the most frightening was when I touched something I shouldn't have inside a CRT with a screwdriver... Let's just say I don't fuck with CRT monitors anymore.
Output of the flyback transformer...very high voltage.
No explosions or being blown back 20+ feet as you would imagine. Just a very large, and very bright spark and the screwdriver ended up flying out of my hand (still not sure if I threw it instinctively or if it was forcibly ejected)
Haha, a techie friend of mine, who also happens to be 400lbs or so, said he was thrown back across the room after touching the wrong part of a monitor. Incredible power stored up in those things...
Mechanical failure of a PSU fan blade, on a Corsair AX1200, after barely 700h of operation. Aah, the joy of running a mining cluster large enough to make improbable failures actually occur once in a while... After the blade broke, the imbalanced fan was making the whole computer chassis vibrate quite hard.
That's when you just break one off on the other side and call it good.
