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Do I know any #zipdrive experts? I have two USB zip drives (100 megabytes). On both as soon as I power them on the green and amber lights turn on, and stay on. There's a second amber led on the PCB which flashes irregularly.
The device doesn't enumerate as a USB device at all, it appears entirely dead. The eject button similarly does nothing.
Does anyone know of any common board level issues with these devices?
Note that there wonky crystal is the same on both boards, and seems to be some kind of weird hack to put a thru hole component on an SMD only board.
Oh yeah, I've tried a different power supply but with no change.
There's also a chip on the board that seems to get kind of uncomfortably warm. So perhaps it really is just entirely dead.
@hp My default assumption would be bad capacitors, do those two in the top-left have signs of bulging/leakage?
Aside from that I don't see any obvious signs of magic smoke escape, so if it did die it didn't do so loudly at least.
Warm chip - what was this board housed in? It may have been relying on heatsinking to the chassis, or airflow from a fan somewhere? Or could just be made to run warm. Or dead as you say.
@hp Sticker says the board is 2001 vintage, which would be in scope for the capacitor plague. If able, I think my first stop would be swapping out those caps and seeing if that gets it to boot more. Symptom would be decreased capacitance and increased ESR, which if those are the bulk caps for the power rail, could result in unstable Vcc. That could certainly get everything else to malfunction.
I don't know if those form factor caps were prone to the plague tho.
@danderson The caps *look* okay, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. I'll try to replace them on one of the boards.
As for airflow etc, nah, these are just in a plastic shell. And it all feels incredibly cheap. Poor solder job, cheap plastics...
It might just be utter shit.
@hp Yeah could just be generally dead, just trying to figure out what would cause runaway heat rather than none heat. I guess power surge making the IC fail in a dead short, but a pair both dying the exact same way... I dunno it's possible but makes me look for common factors in manufacturing.
I guess you could probe out the power rails if you can find them, see if they look stable? And maybe measure current draw and see if it's worryingly high?
@danderson I don't really have a very good bench power supply, so measuring current draw is going to be a bit challenging.
It isn't getting "dead short" hot, just like... way hotter than I'd think would be reasonable given the device. Probably like... 40-50C? based on finger feel.