About a month ago, I came home from work to find my desktop turned off (i leave it on 24/7) and a foul smell of burnt electronics was still hanging in the room.
One of the voltage regulators around the CPU decided to call it quits and caught fire, taking an inductor and a few capacitors down with it.
Amazingly, after that, the machine still booted up fine, being only slightly unstable under full load.
Being switched on 24/7 probably wasn't the best thing that happened to it. But on the other hand, harddrives do tend to last longer when they aren't turning on and off all the time. Only one harddrive crashed during 6 years.
interesting
Definately. The HDD crash also happened when I had to turn the machine off, wich was only a few months ago.
Before that, it was running fine. SMART said it was fine, and I run a drive fitness test every now and then just to see if everything is still OK, and that also checked out fine.
After having it shut off for about 3 hours, the HDD started to degrade fast. Got a couple more weeks out of it, but it started to throw bad sectors, SMART didn't think it was OK, and it started to slow down because of read errors.