EVGA RMA blunder sees customer lose 22TB of storage drives

While EVGA may not be in the graphics card market anymore, the company is still ticking with power supplies, with some units being very popular in the US. Unfortunately, EVGA is making headlines this week for the wrong reasons, after an RMA customer had 22TB worth of SATA drives killed by a replaced power supply.

The power supply is the heart of your PC, supplying power to all critical components. This is the exact reason we always advise on picking up a reputable unit, backed by high efficiency certification and strong reviews. Unfortunately, this isn't always a recipe for success though. Over on Reddit, a user has reported that an RMA'd EVGA power supply has killed off 22TB worth of storage.

The issue begins when the user's EVGA GQ1000W power supply exhibited coil whine, so EVGA had them hand on to their modular cables and reclaimed the power supply. The Redditor was then sent back an ‘identical' unit, but was not informed that the replacement PSU had new internal pinouts. As a result, 12V of power was sent to the SATA drives through older 5V cables, essentially frying all of the connected drives.

When contacting EVGA support, a customer service representative did send out a new batch of cables compatible with the pinouts from the newer version of this PSU, but the damage was already done and the drives were defunct.

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, EVGA did not offer to replace the impacted drives, despite this blunder. If important information had been passed on properly, this entire situation could have been avoided, but due to lapses in communication, this user is now out of an expensive collection of drives and recovering whatever data was on them may not be possible.

Fortunately, this is a rare issue and isn't the sort of thing we hear about very often. One thing is for sure though, more care needs to be taken in the PSU RMA process to ensure customers have the right cables when getting a replacement unit, and we should all be paying a little more attention to our modular cables and their compatibility with future power supplies.

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KitGuru Says: Has anything like this ever happened to you when replacing a modular power supply?

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