New controller board for my hard drive?

jcbullen

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Feb 10, 2012
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So when I was installing a new storage drive (Western Digital MDL: WD1001FALS - 00Y6A0), I closed the side of the case which cause the SATA data cable to bend downwards and snapped off the little L shaped plastic connective piece on the hard drive as well as a couple of the gold connectors. Now the hard drive won't work and I was wondering if it was possible to find a replacement controller board. I've looked around a bit and it seems as if hard drive companies wont sell you one, most likely because they'd rather you buy a new one if something goes wrong and make more money. If I can't find a new controller board, would anybody know how to fix something like this?
 

autonomous

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Aug 28, 2011
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You can try straightening the connectors and glueing the plastic piece back in, or you can try calling Western Digital and seeing if they'll send you a new board.
 

jcbullen

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Feb 10, 2012
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Yeah the Western Digital website says that they dont do replacement controller boards. I'm not quite sure how I'd reattach the gold connector either... I just bought the drive so there wasn't much of anything on it, I just really don't want to have thrown $150 down the drain over a stupid little thing.
 
A direct board swap rarely works on modern WD drives. This is because each board stores unique, drive specific "adaptive" information, either in an 8-pin serial flash memory at location U12, or within the Marvell MCU. These data would need to be transferred to your replacement PCB.