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Dead NAS HDD... will replacing the PCB bring it back to life?

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Dougmeister

Senior member
Let me preface this with a summary of the death: power supply blew, taking motherboard, CPU, video card, and one of my hard drives with it.

The HDD was less than 6 months old. The drive will not power up whether it is connected to known good cables internally or in an external enclosure. I can not feel it or hear it spinning.

This company says they will duplicate the PCB: http://www.onepcbsolution.com/

I guess if I knew what I was doing, it might be possible to buy the exact model PCB. Then again, some people tell me that it absolutely has to have the same firmware. Not sure what to think about that.

For $50, I am willing to try these guys. Any thoughts?
 
At first glance, I thought it was too high. Then I thought it would be a good try to save the movies I have on them. Especially, the hours it would take to reproduce it on another drive. Nowadays, I have 5 backups for everything I deem important.
 
What's really killing me is that I don't know what I lost on the drive. It happened a few months ago and I thought it was just the power supply. Then I found out the motherboard was also bad. Then the CPU... then the video card... then the hard drive. Work has been crazy, so it took me this long to finally complete the diagnosis.

There might be some family home movies that I had copied from the camcorder to the hard drive but did not burn to DVD yet.

I decided to try this company for $50.
 
Dougmeister said:
Then again, some people tell me that it absolutely has to have the same firmware. Not sure what to think about that.

For $50, I am willing to try these guys. Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

I've updated firmware on HDDs (Remember the Seagate fiasco? I owned one of those drives.)

I don't see why a firmware change should radically alter the way a disk controller accesses the data on the platters, especially if it's already been written down under an older regime.

A PCB with the same part # ought to be able to read the data on the platters, no?

I'd be more worried about the spindle motor being ruined.
 
Not all of the firmware is updated. Certain parameters, such as the settings for write current of each head and the current for the head servo, are written permanently at the factory for the particular sample of the drive and must be maintained to prevent damage to the related components, even when the PCB is changed. Onepcbsolution.com does that by taking the firmware chip from the original drive and soldering it to the replacement PCB.

There is a good chance the drive wasn't damaged but instead its fuses blew open when the TVS diodes shorted to protect the drive from excessive voltage. Replacing the fuses and TVS diodes may restore operation.
 
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