Possible WD Caviar Green PCB failure?

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Deleted member 2448387

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Greetings everyone,

I'm new to the forum so I hope I'm doing everything right.

A while back (a good few months ago) this external 2TB Memup drive I have stopped working. I can't recall the moment very well but I think I assumed its power adapter was at fault and disposed of it.

The enclosure suffered a drop and opened itself at some point in time, so I decided to take the drive out and hook it up to a SATA to USB converter I have. Strangely, its power supply was suddenly dead.

A few days ago the replacement charger (for the enclosure) arrived (right specs) but no sign of life from the drive. The LED on the enclosure just flashed dimly. I tried inserting another drive into the enclosure (a 1TB WD Caviar Black I had laying around) and, lo and behold, it worked fine.

By this point I got a bit worried since I would like to get my data back. In a desperate move I hooked up the drive to an old PowerMac G4 (only tower computer I own) through a SATA to Molex cable. Surprisingly, the computer never booted with the drive plugged in (started up and tuned back off) Unplugging it leaves everything normal.

I hope this is some kind of PCB-related problem. I hear no noise from the drive, it's not trying to spin. Should I order a PCB online? The one in the drive has no visible signs of damage/burning.
It's a 2TB WD Caviar Green with 64MB cache.


Best regards,
hardwaregreen
 
Solution
RealBeast
You would simply be gambling that the PCB was the problem and that is well under a 50% chance here from the event. Is the data extremely important? If it is valuable enough that you would pay 500-1000 for recovery, then sure it is probably worth either buying a pcb or better yet an entire used identical working drive (it must be the same firmware version) for the same price and give it a try.

Clean room data recovery is *very* expensive and is not guaranteed to be complete even though you have to pay the big price. You can check that out HERE.

On the other hand if the data can be obtained again or is backed up but just inconvenient to recreate then you'll have to think about it some.
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After dropping the drive it is more likely a damaged drive and not a PCB issue.

In all likelihood buying another PCB (that must be the exact same one) would be a waste of money. A new drive is not much more and will definitely work (or at least be under warranty).
 
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Keep in mind the enclosure's power supply failed... Maybe the drive caused it as well? That was before the drop.

My goal is simply to get this drive working so I can get data off it... That is why I thought of the PCB replacement. Replacing the drive is definitely not my priority right now.

Would the PCB swap work (even if expensive) or am I better off getting help from a data recovery pro?
 
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You would simply be gambling that the PCB was the problem and that is well under a 50% chance here from the event. Is the data extremely important? If it is valuable enough that you would pay 500-1000 for recovery, then sure it is probably worth either buying a pcb or better yet an entire used identical working drive (it must be the same firmware version) for the same price and give it a try.

Clean room data recovery is *very* expensive and is not guaranteed to be complete even though you have to pay the big price. You can check that out HERE.

On the other hand if the data can be obtained again or is backed up but just inconvenient to recreate then you'll have to think about it some.
 
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