Basically its causing a statics zap or a short circuit ...so it’s not going to affect the date on the platters its just going to disable the electronics ..put a new circuit board on the drive and it’s going to be available again
As long as the USB port is properly isolated from the main components you should be protected... so they’re not blowing all PC motherboards are just blowing cheap PC motherboards
Fail
I think I said that. . . but there are a lot of "cheap PC motherboards" out there that these can zap. There was a lot of questions when this first came up last year about how much damage they could do the SSDs, and no one really knew a definitive answer. SSDs are not like the platters on a magnetic drive. My viewpoint is that probably the devastating damage to the motherboard would probably limit the damage that could be done to the solid state drives before it ever got that far and most likely the data would be preserved. The motherboard would be toast before any surges got through that would effect the peripherals attached to it. i.e. the frying of the motherboard would act as a sort of fuse protecting the rest, if the USB circuitry didn't do it first. At some point the traces on the boards might even give out, if the amperage and voltage were high enough, stopping the damage from going further.
The question then becomes one of economics: is it more economical to repair the computer or just replace it and restore the data from a backup? (You do have one, right? That question is part of the economic considerations.)
They are throwing a big nasty pulse on the 5V_Logic plane. Depending on how well the boards handle voltage spikes (and companies like Dell tend to minimize the isolation caps to save money) this could take out the USB Hub (because it is closest) but then the South Bridge or I/O Hub and basically brick the entire machine. As long as the 5V_Logic bus is hot, this device is going to send pulses out on the bus and do damage.
Then you have the “walking wounded” IC’s that may still work but are severely degraded. Such as the processor. The smaller the transistor geometries, the more susceptibile they are to this kind of damage.