Seagate 7200.11 and 7200.12 Logic Board question

Hey all, I have in my posession a bricked 7200.11 500Gb drive.

the drive is 1 of 2 from a Raid0 setup, and unfortunately, it has the dreaded firmware bug that makes the drive inaccessible without any notice (at this point its a brick anyways until I get the part to flash it manually). Just turned on the pc one day and my second raid setup was gone.

So my question is:
If I were to purchase 2 new 7200.12 500Gb drives (because the 7200.11's are all but gone now from everywhere), same size and spec (cache size), would I be able to mount the logic boards from the new 7200.12 drives onto to old 7200.11 drives, and have it work?

I'm really unsure of being able to do this successfully. Don't know much about it.

After searching the web I found the fix for the old drive (without having to send it in and most likely loose everything), but it will be next week before then part gets here to perform the process. So I'm a bit impatient I guess, and somewhat curious if swapping out the logic boards will work.

fyi - I've gone through all the test and the problem is definitely with the Firmware on the old logic board. I even swapped the boards to make sure the "bricked" drive would show in the bios, and all is well there.

You can read more about the 7200.11 issue here: http://www.msfn.org/board/solution [...] 28807.html

Yep. For this trick to work, you need identical logic boards.

I answered my last post with some we searching.

Thanks for the replies. Patiently waiting on the flash kit.

Will post back results

With the 7200.11, unbricking via that method is unlikely to work anyways. In hard drives, since every drive is slightly different, correction factors are applied during initial calibration at the factory. These are needed for the drive to position itself accurately enough to read each track. In the 7200.10 series and earlier, these correction factors were stored on the drive itself (in much larger, easier to read tracks), allowing the drive to retain the proper operating values even with a swapped board. The 7200.11 and newer store the values in flash on the board though, which makes it unlikely to read any data at all if you swap boards. The correction factors for the drive you are swapping from will be different from the drive you are swapping to, and it simply will not read the tracks. It may even destroy the data.