So that's why his right arm is so ripped.

Or was that because of something else *smirk*

Hard drives love to die, nothing quite like that click click click click click sound of the heads trying to figure out what the fuck to do inside a failed drive.

Back stuff up people! Anything that is important to you, have it backed up on at least 1 other drive, or online storage like onedrive (free 30gb of storage from MS) Amazing service that.

PSU failure isn't the worst thing to happen.

HDD failures happen to me the most often -- and they're an absolute terror if you're someone who physically needs his data to continue surviving. This is why back-ups (and to a lesser extent cloud storage, but the limited space is problematic) are golden.

I have also had my graphics card fail on me. That wasn't quite as horrifying. All it meant was that I had to spend 150 bucks and buy a new one.

My family members, however, have had almost the exact opposite luck. They have had motherboards, fans, and PSUs die on them, but somehow have managed to avoid HDD failure. It is baffling to me.

Polishing his belt buckle

Yeah, PSU is the most common replacement for me. I had a videocard fan burn up and the fan fall off, which was nice. A CPU cooling fan messed up once under warranty and they sent me a replacement for me to put on myself so I wouldn't have to send the whole thing back.

Right now, my PC is starting to make a bit of a whining sound so I guess the PSU is about to die. I almost never turn my PC off, either.

So I bought a new PSU and interesting things happened. First I got the exact same symptoms as with the old one. Then I took some components out to reduce the possible errors. When I unplugged the power cable for the SATA ports that lead to the 2 disks it suddenly worked again. Then I put it back in and it still worked. I have not yet checked the old PSU but I assume that it wasn't its fault and it's still working properly.

My latest deduction is that there are bad contacts on the SATA data ports which caused a short circuit, which then prompted the PSU to shut off. That perfectly lines up with the symptoms. When I turned the PC on it worked for a split second and then immediately shut down again as a safe mechanism when it discovered the short circuit.

The problem with the initial troubleshooting was that it instantly worked with the spare test PSU which let me to believe that it's definitely the PSU. But it probably only worked because I did not connect the disks.

But now I'm too lazy to investigate it again but the conclusion seems sound. I will investigate further when or if it happens again.