Faulty external HDD slot causes death of HDD

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Leondebarbon

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Mar 28, 2014
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I have a Cooler Master case with an external HDD slot, so i can hook up SATA HDD's without having to open the case and lay down cables or using a usb connector.

I had a 1TB Western digital HDD which his external case power supply died, and I took it apart to hook my HDD up to my PC

(Note, I am a network engineer as profession and worked 3 years in a computer store, so I know all the ins and outs of hardware)

So I hooked up my HDD directly to my PC, and it will not be recognized, to test if the cable was not of fault, i hooked up my 2nd external hard drive and it did show up in the drive manager.

I contacted my ex-colleague at the PC store and asked if they had an old HDD with the same control board, to get my HDD back to life.

Now I wanted to test my external slot in the PC to see if it would work with my 2nd drive, when I plugged the HDD in and wanted to start my PC, it would not start.

Fearing the worst I unhooked my HDD and my PC started, hooking my 2nd HDD directly to a SATA port my PC would not start up.

So I came to a quick solution, the external HDD slot in my PC is faulty, causing HDD's to receive too much power and breaking them, and as a safety measure my PC wont start.
Everything inside the PC is hooked up correctly, I've assembled and desembled hundreds of different PC rigs, so the only conclusion I could come up with is I got bad luck and a bad part.

Will I be able to save these 2 HDD's with a new control board, knowing the most likely cause of the problem ?

Thx in advance
Leon

 
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millwright

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The control board not only has to be the same model, it has to be the same revision.
They make slight changes in hardware all the time.
IT pro I know that do this buy 50 or 100 hard drives at one time to insure they can swap boards when drives go bad.

It is not possible for any power supply to give a component too much power.
Electricity just doesn't work that way.
Load controls the amount of current used.
The power supply will only give the hard drive what it asks for.


I would test the hard drive in question inside the case.
I wouldn't install it, but would hook it to the inside connections, outside the case to test.
If it doesn't work in either place, I'd assume it is dead.

If it spins, but can't be read, there are programs that can recover it.
 
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Leondebarbon

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Mar 28, 2014
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I already did this, as stated in my original post,
the first HDD will not be recognized by the PC and the 2nd will prevent the PC from ever starting.
Electricity has always been my weak point, isnt it possible a weak resistor or a loose/bad connector inside the external connector (this is a hot swappable case where you can plugin the HDD, not via USB but SATA, which is located in a CD slot inside the PC) can lead to too much power being delivered to the HDD ?


 
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millwright

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No, as I said, that is not how electricity works.

If you are talking about bad parts in the hard drive, then that is another story.
A bad part that is shorting out can draw more electricity, but only to the short, be cause the short is asking for more electricity flow.

At that point it has already failed.
If the short melts the drive, the parts touch ground, and then flow is unlimited until the power supply fails from too much load.

Once you have a short, you are dealing with the uncontrolled flow of electricity

If you have a short, it is kinda irrelevant what the short destroys, as it could even melt the case.

Edit
Under normal circumstances the only part that suffers from too much electrical flow, is the power supply.

If the demand is 500watts and the power supply is a 400 watt, it will put out what the demand is, 500watts, until it dies.

edit
The power supply is protected from a dead short, by it's circuit breaker.
 
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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There are two problems that I can see.

The first is that WD's 3TB external drives are configured with a 4KB sector size. If you remove such a drive from its enclosure and connect it directly to a SATA port, you will expose its native 512e sector size and render the file system inaccessible.

The second problem appears to be that something has overvolted the drives. This causes the drive's protection diode (either the 12V or 5V TVS diode) to go short circuit, which then causes the PSU to shut down.

After rectifying the source of the problem, the simple solution is to remove the shorted diode.

See http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diode_FAQ.html

... and http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/bigcircuitboard_diodes.jpg
 
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