During a recent move we misplaced ALL of our backup drives power supplies.
An un suspecting employee just plugged in the nearest power adapter that seemed to be the right shape, and powered up one of the units, containing most of 2013's backup (not yet had a chance to move to the raid array). Enough said - the enclosure was fried, and so was the PCB on the hard drive inside the enclosure. Smoke was coming out of the board when i went to plug in directly to computer sata connection.
this almost 2 TB of data was, well, how to say - important.
Some research showed that i can replace just the PCB, after local data recovery experts wanted 99$ just to examine the drive.
So i looked up on how to do this, and it seems that in the olden days one could just buy another drive of the same model and production range, and just swap the boards out, but in our day and age, the boards all contain an Eprom chip dedicated to that exact drive, and replacing the board, even with the exact same one might not work. Some more short research led to PCB solution (Hard Drive Donor PCB for Seagate Barracuda WD Caviar Scorpio Samsung Hitachi Maxtor DiamondMax | PCB Solution) as a place that transfers the Eprom chip to the new board. While i have a soldering gun, replacing that tiny chip was out of my capabilities (2 boards had to be sacrificed to find that out).
So away went the board to them. 2 days after they got it they sent out the replacement board - and OMG - low and behold - the drive was alive and working (and got transferred to the array right away). So in a nutshell - if your drive board is fried - dont fret, it is not the end of the world.
I guess there is no better feeling then getting so much data back, after it was all gone. Hope this info is useful someone in the same sitaution.
An un suspecting employee just plugged in the nearest power adapter that seemed to be the right shape, and powered up one of the units, containing most of 2013's backup (not yet had a chance to move to the raid array). Enough said - the enclosure was fried, and so was the PCB on the hard drive inside the enclosure. Smoke was coming out of the board when i went to plug in directly to computer sata connection.
this almost 2 TB of data was, well, how to say - important.
Some research showed that i can replace just the PCB, after local data recovery experts wanted 99$ just to examine the drive.
So i looked up on how to do this, and it seems that in the olden days one could just buy another drive of the same model and production range, and just swap the boards out, but in our day and age, the boards all contain an Eprom chip dedicated to that exact drive, and replacing the board, even with the exact same one might not work. Some more short research led to PCB solution (Hard Drive Donor PCB for Seagate Barracuda WD Caviar Scorpio Samsung Hitachi Maxtor DiamondMax | PCB Solution) as a place that transfers the Eprom chip to the new board. While i have a soldering gun, replacing that tiny chip was out of my capabilities (2 boards had to be sacrificed to find that out).
So away went the board to them. 2 days after they got it they sent out the replacement board - and OMG - low and behold - the drive was alive and working (and got transferred to the array right away). So in a nutshell - if your drive board is fried - dont fret, it is not the end of the world.
I guess there is no better feeling then getting so much data back, after it was all gone. Hope this info is useful someone in the same sitaution.
