Killed my surge protector and my NAS in one bad cable pull

So last Tuesday I was reorganizing behind my TV stand in my apartment in Austin. I yanked on what I thought was a dead HDMI cable, turns out it was wrapped around the power strip cord. Pulled hard enough that the whole strip yanked off the wall mount and shorted everything on that outlet. Fried my NAS drive and the surge protector itself. Cost me about $180 for a new drive and now I'm redoing all the cables with velcro ties and a proper cable tray. Anyone else ever short something out just by being too aggressive with a cable purge?

2 comments

2 Comments

river19018h ago

Remember thinking surge protectors were basically invincible and just there to catch power spikes from storms. This post totally proves how wrong I was, especially the part about the physical damage doing way more harm than any electrical surge. That yank probably stressed the internal components in a way they were never built to handle, so the protector just gave up along with your drive. Makes total sense now that a bad cable layout can kill your gear just as fast as a power outage. I always figured cable management was just about looks, but now I see it's real safety stuff. Definitely going to double check how my own wires are wrapped around the power strip in my living room.

rileyjones18h ago

Guilty as charged on the cable management part, @river190, my entertainment center looks like a spaghetti monster threw up, but at least now I know the real risk is a yanked cord taking out my whole setup. Probably should've figured that out before I had to replace a drive last year, but better late than never, right?