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.