Any way to fix hard drives that simultaneously failed?

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Swashbuckling

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Mar 30, 2014
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A while back I booted up my PC only to have all 3 of my hard drives die on me simultaneously, since then I have replaced my PSU with a more reputable one (corsair) and replaced all my HDDs, but I would like to know if there are any ways I could potentially "fix" the hard drives to be able to retrieve the data on them, I read a thread saying that this could be a TVS diode problem or something, and removing this may help, but after looking at pictures of a TVS diode and looking at my HDD I noticed that another part of the chip was actually broken:

This is the HDD I would like to fix:
h0Qftul.jpg

After viewing this I actually noticed that this part was broken:
wNoMgj2.jpg

Could this have been the cause of the failure? Or a result of the failure? Could it be fixed?
 
Solution
F
The physically damaged component is a coil. It is part of a switchmode supply that generates -5V for the preamp on the headstack. Measure the resistance between the coil's pads. It should be close to 0. Also measure the voltage at the right side of the B240 diode to the right of the coil. It should be -5V. Do this with the PCB removed from the drive.

If your drives don't spin, then measure the resistances of the following components:

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HD103SJ_TVS_2.jpg

If the SSD were killed by an overvoltage, then it would have been on the +5V supply. That's because SSDs aren't typically powered from +12V (some enterprise SSDs are).
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Swashbuckling

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Mar 30, 2014
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I'm currently looking for a screwdriver to open up the other one to see if it has the same damage, but I should have been more specific and said that it was 2 HDDs and an SSD, so I would assume that the SSD wouldn't have this same physical damage. I'll let you know if the other HDD has that same damage once I find the screwdriver
 
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TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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Obviously a short due to a faulty power supply is going to cause problems on the PCB of a hard drive differently than on an ssd.
If it's a secondary component(diode, etc...) that's failed and not the controller, eeprom, etc... then it should be pretty straightforward to repair.
 
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TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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You don't unless you have a lot of experience with electronics repair.
You'll only make things worse.

You can get a replacement PCB for a couple hundred dollars from a company that will properly swap the adaptives to make it work.
On the SSD it's more complicated and you'll need a professional data recovery lab.
 
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fzabkar

Judicious
Sep 22, 2010
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The physically damaged component is a coil. It is part of a switchmode supply that generates -5V for the preamp on the headstack. Measure the resistance between the coil's pads. It should be close to 0. Also measure the voltage at the right side of the B240 diode to the right of the coil. It should be -5V. Do this with the PCB removed from the drive.

If your drives don't spin, then measure the resistances of the following components:

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HD103SJ_TVS_2.jpg

If the SSD were killed by an overvoltage, then it would have been on the +5V supply. That's because SSDs aren't typically powered from +12V (some enterprise SSDs are).
 
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