Hit 500 board repairs last month and it snuck up on me

2 comments

2 Comments

I just saw a video from a tech YouTuber talking about how rack-level repairs have been getting more common with all these new server designs. 500 repairs in a month is a huge number, must be a busy shop. Was it mostly power supply swaps or did you get into some weird motherboard failures too? I remember when we hit 300 a few years back and it felt like we were drowning in work.

gonzalez.phoenix22d ago

...and honestly, the weird stuff is what really drives that number up. Power supply swaps are still the bread and butter, maybe 60% of our work. But we've been seeing a lot of those new hot-swap drive backplanes just straight up dying after a year. The plastic tabs snap off and then the whole thing has to come out. Also had a weird run of motherboard failures where the BMC chip would just stop responding entirely, no lights, no ping, nothing. That was a pain because you'd think it was a power issue at first and waste time swapping PSUs. Take this with a grain of salt, but I swear the newer the design, the more random stuff breaks.