Question: So I was a victim of the classic wrong-PSU-cable and fried 3 HDDs with different situations:
One 8 year old WD Black with SMOOTH chips burnt out and doesn’t appear to be anything else.
One 8 years old WD Black with SMOOTH chip and what appears to be another black thing, maybe a D12 diode? (I don’t know how to read circuit boards)
One 1 year old WD Red with what appears to have no damage and no lingering burnt smell like the other two.
Is it safe to assume that just a PCB and firmware swap with www.onepcbsolution.com would save these drives? Or am I better off going to a professional and pay up the big bucks?
For the WD Red, is it still a fried PCB despite not seeing and burnt parts on the board? Is the best bet to still proceed with a cheaper PCB swap service?
Thanks in advance.
Answer:
Thanks for the read. I thought I had a lot of things covered by having a redundancy in my system, a highly rated PSU, power surge protector etc. But nothing prepared me for not knowing that different PSU cables have catastrophic effect like this.
At least my WD Red appears to have survived better so perhaps it will a less expensive fix. Though it’s 1 week behind in backup, recovering that would mean I get all the important files back. I’ll just redo 1 weeks worth of work and not have to go for the data recovery route.
Hardware redundancy is not data redundancy.
That above linked procedure fully justified itself in a single drive fail.
960GB SSD, 605 GB on it, mostly irreplaceable photo library.
Click click…recovered ALL of it, exactly as it was at 4AM that morning when it ran its nightly backup.
Whether it is something you did, the drive just died, nasty virus, whatever…a second (or 3rd/4th) copy of your data is the key.
Cheap and easy.