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I once plugged a USB type B connector into an external hard drive blind (it was dark) and was rewarded with a zap and a dead hard drive. The connector went in t

• tzs 2y ago
  I did that with the 4 pin Molex connector in a drive in the '80s. That normally takes a tremendous amount of force, but the connector on the drive side gad the most pliable plastic I've every seen on a connector. The drive was loaned to us for testing by a disk controller company that had hired us to write drivers for their new controller, and they had received the disk on loan from IBM. It was a 1 gig drive at a time when 200 MB was the norm for a big personal computer disk and not yet on the market. At that stage only a select few outside of IBM had been loaned these drives for testing. I was pretty freaked out. I assumed that I'd be in a lot of trouble for destroying the drive. I told the person who had loaned us the drive what happened and he told me that he'd fried two of these drives the same way! He'd found out from his contact at IBM that IBM was losing about 10% of the drives from the early production runs due to their own technicians plugging power in backwards when testing the drives as they came off the line. The contact also said that IBM had already revised the parts list to switch to a Molex connector whose plastic was firm enough to end this problem.