Quote Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
The issue with liquids is their conductivity. You totally shorted something, though there are worse things than coffee (soda, for instance, especially something like coke that has lots of acid in it), however, if the residue dried, you could have an electrolytic bridge somewhere on the drive such that when you apply power it goes where it shouldn't go. Distilled water can barely conduct enough electricity to shock you well, so it would be somewhat better than coffee residue.

I ran a SD card through a washing machine and a dishwasher to see what would happen to it (nothing happened, except the thread on that little experiment ended up pretty high in Google under my name). Whether water actually made it into the internal components during either test is hard to say. When I opened up the case, I found a white residue in there, but I had boiled the card in salt water for five minutes at that time, and that had killed the card. The residue may have been salt from the boiling.

In any case, water shouldn't really do any more damage than the coffee did (at least with the power off), and would remove any residue remaining from the coffee, so it's worth a try.
you really should be careful with those tests. I plugged a shorted device into a usb slot once... That motherboard no longer works usb.