We had a broadcast storm that went undiagnosed for several hours. After the problem switch was unplugged and traffic returned to normal, we had a handful of machines and switches that were broken. On one switch, the sole uplink interface had to be moved to another int. On another, one of the two etherchannel physical members is down. One machine has a SSD and it didn't boot up after it was shut down. BIOS says it's a 32 KB disk. At least one other server's fans would ramp up to high RPMs every couple of minutes.
I read that storm traffic not intended for a machine is dropped by the NIC, but broadcast traffic is sent up the network stack and can cause high CPU utilization. I imagine if the OS was writing log files because of the increased network activity it could eventually fill up disk space and/or burn up an SSD because of the increased read/writes.
Best Answer
I don't think this is possible. A broadcast storm from a bridge loop will effectively bring down much/all of your network (depending on bandwidth) but doing some permanent damage to the hardware is hardly imaginable unless cooling is barely working. Exhausting TBW on an SSD is also hardly likely - maybe with packet capture and a ring buffer...
Could you find out what exactly happened? Is it possible the cause wasn't a bridge loop but a hacking attack? A hacker covering up his tracks?