[SOLVED] Failed platter drive analysis

[thecaptain0220]

I have a couple of platter drives that are dead. They are Western Digital Blue drives. I am not concerned about getting any data back. I am wondering if there are any tools, hardware, etc that will allow me to get more information on why they died. It would be nice to be able to view the smart attributes to see if there are any that were pointing to failure before they died. It seems like that data would be stored somewhere on the controller board and not on the drive itself. Is there any way to retrieve the data even though the drive has physically failed? I have tried to do some searching, but i just end up with a bunch of articles talking about how to recover data with software. I cant find any good information on hdd failure analysis. It seems like there would be tools for this, but maybe I'm wrong. I figured I would ask and see if anyone could point me in the right direction.

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

these are dead as in no response whatsoever when connected?
usually failed drives are still detected though you may not be able to actually access the data.
software scans are usually still able to create a report.

if the drives are totally dead then you would probably need to pay a technician with the necessary hardware to dismantle the drive and assess them for you.

 

[fzabkar]

What are the symptoms? Do they spin up? Any clicking?

HDD from inside: Hard Drive Main parts:
https://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

The hard drive -- a computer-within-a-computer:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=2600

 

[thecaptain0220]

They spin up and there is a nice clunk a couple of times after a bit. The seem to keep spinning however. I connected them to Ubuntu but could find any sign of them. I didn't see anything with lsblk or blkid. The clunk is what makes me feel like something with the platters has failed and not the control board.