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Power supply causes click of death. Data not really lost! It's strange in some ways how in built industrial obsolescence will some times hit you in the face. On the other hand that is what it's supposed to do, FAIL! Among other things it's annoying and an environmental waste. It also dosen't have to be like this. I once had the honor of taking apart an old Mac SE. It had an early hard drive installed in it and it was still going strong. That hard drive was 12 years old! Considering that most modern hard drives will fail after about 3 years I often think that there is a possible case for negligence on behalf of a number of big industrial companies. But I digress. I've recently been using a number of external hard drives of various brands, a number of them rather old and it seems a lot of the trouble with these devices is actually the power supply. They may look as though they are working, you may even get a nice reassuring green light after plugging the device in. The device may even appear to be working or attempting to work - you may even occasionally get the device to work partially but over time or often all at once the device will fail. I am discovering that the issue is often incorrect voltage! A friend of mine who is an electrician was talking to me about this and he said it's usually a case of faulty capacitors! So not only did I recently have some interesting problems with hard drives, I have an old router that I've been hacking about with and that had died as well. I took the top off of this thing and plugged it in to see if I could work out what was going on. I could smell the problem! The device had a few capacitors on the main board and not long after I had started the thing up I discovered that I could smell this strange chemical smell - it seemed to be coming from the big fat capacitor! (See pic) At this point I thought what the heck and got out my old rusty soldering iron and removed the smelly capacitor. I took that along to my local friendly electronics store and asked do you have another one of these? Well for the grand price of $1.60 I could have a replacement for my smelly capacitor! I took it home soldered it in place an lo and behold I now have a working router! This means less land fill, more fun for me and a saving of about $90, which it would have cost to replace the thing! I'd like to thank the people from http://www.adafruit.com as they are a constant positive influence on me and my mate Neil who got me thinking about all this. To finish up I'm reminded of a similar incident about 10 - 12 years ago. Someone I worked for had a faulty router it was worth about $1000.00 and it had died. Due to the fact that this was a Saturday morning and we needed this link to our servers working, we went out and brought another router! The thing that had failed was the power brick - it would have probably cost $1.60 in parts to fix the thing - but we were in a hurry! So go out and talk to, find your local electronics store. Find out how to check the voltage of things. Also a great thing to purchase for emergencies is a variable voltage power supply. It may just save you a buck or 3! Steve  Router with new non smelly capacitor! 
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