| Electronics > Beginners |
| How often do discrete smd parts fail on hard drives ? |
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| BradC:
--- Quote from: tooki on August 07, 2018, 10:20:21 pm ---FYI, you cannot swap the PCB anyway. It stores a bunch of drive-specific stuff (like the map of remapped sectors) in EEPROM. --- End quote --- That's not entirely accurate. There *are* drive specific adaptives that are stored in eeprom/flash on most of the new drives. Sometimes they are in an external chip and sometimes they are in the main uC. Some of the major aftermarket drive service tools (we're talking >$10k tools) are capable of re-building those to some degree. Some can copy the adaptives between boards. On boards with an discrete external memory, that can be swapped over. The adaptives hold enough information on the mechanical charactersitics and tolerances to allow the drive to load its second stage firmware from the service area (SA) on the platters. It is also in the SA that things like SMART attributes, defect tables and additional adaptives are stored. Quite often the repeated "click, click, click" signaling drive death is either the drive unable to read the SA due to electronic or mechanical failure, or the SA having been corrupted. In the latter case the right tools can often re-build the SA and get access to the data. In the former then mechanical repair or board swaps are generally required. In some cases and with a bit of dumb luck, a straight board swap might work. If the boards have a discrete eeprom, and are similar enough in hardware/firmware then a chip swap will do the trick. As always, if the data is valuable, talk to a professional. |
| tooki:
Thanks for the info!! Sounds like it's worth it for data recovery, but beyond silly as a repair. |
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