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Just a short story to possibly inspire someone else to not give up when a hard drive fails.
I have two older 3.5 Western Digital 1.5 TB hard drives (WD15EADS), each mounted in a very nice aluminum enclosure with a FW400, two FW800, an eSATA and a USB 2.0 port.
Both have backed up files from years ago - one of these I use occasionally to ceck some information on it, the other one I haven't had connected to the Mac or to power for probably a few years.
A fedays ago I wanted some data from the drive I hadn't looked at, plugged in the FW800 interface, powred upthe external.....nothing.
The units have an external 5/12 volt power brick, the light in the power brick turned off when I switch on power on the external.
On the other identical external the power light stayed on - so it seemed the enclosure of the drive that wasn't working presented a short or low impedance to the power brick.
OK - these were separate enclosures I had bought for these drives and I have had the SATA interface board on external enclosures become defective before.
No problem since I had the second drive with even the same enclosure, so I switched drives. Still the same problem.
I put the good drive into the, what I thought was the defective enclosure - it showed up fine on the desktop.
So the hard drive itself went belly up.
Hmmm......normally I would just get rid of the drive - I checked the date, 2009, can't complain about an 11-year old drive giving up the ghost.
But I had some old files I hadn't backed up anywhere else,files that were nice to have, but not essential, so I decided to spend a little more time to dig deeper.
When I powered up the defective drive I could feel that the platters were not spinning - so the problem wasn't necessarily a head crash.
Problem was either that the motor was seized just sitting for several years - that sounded like a real possibility, or the motor had somehow become defective, unlikely just sitting at my desk, or the controller board ad become defective -
So I got out my meter and did a few measurements. motor impedances seem ok, but no power to the motor.
Can't test for a seized up motor anyway or replace it if that is the problem, but I did have the drive controller board from the good drive to swap.
So did that - and success!
Sort of interesting, trying to think back, it seems for all the defective externals I have had, the problem was always the enclosure interface or now the drive controller interface, not the mechanical part of the drive itself.
I have two older 3.5 Western Digital 1.5 TB hard drives (WD15EADS), each mounted in a very nice aluminum enclosure with a FW400, two FW800, an eSATA and a USB 2.0 port.
Both have backed up files from years ago - one of these I use occasionally to ceck some information on it, the other one I haven't had connected to the Mac or to power for probably a few years.
A fedays ago I wanted some data from the drive I hadn't looked at, plugged in the FW800 interface, powred upthe external.....nothing.
The units have an external 5/12 volt power brick, the light in the power brick turned off when I switch on power on the external.
On the other identical external the power light stayed on - so it seemed the enclosure of the drive that wasn't working presented a short or low impedance to the power brick.
OK - these were separate enclosures I had bought for these drives and I have had the SATA interface board on external enclosures become defective before.
No problem since I had the second drive with even the same enclosure, so I switched drives. Still the same problem.
I put the good drive into the, what I thought was the defective enclosure - it showed up fine on the desktop.
So the hard drive itself went belly up.
Hmmm......normally I would just get rid of the drive - I checked the date, 2009, can't complain about an 11-year old drive giving up the ghost.
But I had some old files I hadn't backed up anywhere else,files that were nice to have, but not essential, so I decided to spend a little more time to dig deeper.
When I powered up the defective drive I could feel that the platters were not spinning - so the problem wasn't necessarily a head crash.
Problem was either that the motor was seized just sitting for several years - that sounded like a real possibility, or the motor had somehow become defective, unlikely just sitting at my desk, or the controller board ad become defective -
So I got out my meter and did a few measurements. motor impedances seem ok, but no power to the motor.
Can't test for a seized up motor anyway or replace it if that is the problem, but I did have the drive controller board from the good drive to swap.
So did that - and success!
Sort of interesting, trying to think back, it seems for all the defective externals I have had, the problem was always the enclosure interface or now the drive controller interface, not the mechanical part of the drive itself.
