Bricked HDD...can it be fixed?

[Karovmac]

Okay so long story short, I had a 1.5TB external hard drive some years ago, and one day when I plugged it in it just would not turn on.
I seemed to think at the time that it had shorted or had been fried.
I removed it from its enclosure and went to test it today.
I plugged it into the hot swap bay on my PC case, and when I turned my PC on it didn’t power up and a bit of smoke came out of the HDD.
My PC would then not power up, and after a minor heart attack I decided to disconnect the SATA cable for the hot swap bay, and now my computer works again (phew)
Which leads me to believe that the HDD has fried the hot swap bay.
I’ve read that Hard drives can be fixed by replacing the PCB’s.
Would this likely fix it? Or is it completely F****D?

 

[RememberThe5th]

Well, from my what Ive read, you need to find exact same pcb model on online site and replace it.
Also it has to be same firmware, but if you dont have any important data, I highly suggest you to buy new one, since the chance of the new pcb not working or working is 50%/50%.

Also I think then youre gonna need do a deep scan and recover data from it since the data location stays on the cache of the pcb ( like 500GB 8mb cache), thats what cache is used for.

 

[seagate_surfer]

Karovmac, removing a drive from its enclosure is not recommended. If smoke came out of the HDD it is probably from the PCB board. It is best to count your blessings that your computer still works and move on.

 

[drtweak]

Its not as easy. Even with the exact same PCB its a hit and miss. Sometimes there are chips on the PCB that have to be swapped as well.