Recently my WD My Book Essential 1Tb HDD gave up on me. I use this HDD to store all my backup data mostly movies and other multimedia content. As this HDD is 3.5" it requires external power supply. This HDD is hardly portable, I always keep it connected to my router and access it over WiFi.
This is a 3.5" HDD and requires 12V power when compared to the 2.5" HDD which work with 5V . I don't have a desktop PC which has 12V power supply to troubleshoot the HDD. The power adapter that came with the HDD was working fine and was rated 12V. So i thought that if somehow i can use this power adapter to power this HDD and read it on my laptop. My first reaction was to buy a new enclosure for the HDD, but was not sure if the HDD was working or not.
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| Old and new board glued together with old board on top and new board on bottom |
I have a couple of 2.5" USB HDD so I thought of using one of them to read this big HDD. I know that the 2.5" and 3.5" HDD that I have the same SATA interface so technically it should work with the 2.5" USB casing only thing that was pending was 12V power for the 3.5" HDD. The 12V and 5V converter on the original board was working fine. I connected the USB to SATA adapter from the 2.5" enclosure the HDD and rerouted the original 12V and 5V power from original board to new board.
You can see from the below image the pin layout the SATA power connector. I have routed the +5V and +12V from the original controller board to the new boards SATA power connector.
This new board is only USB 2.0 unlike the original board which supported USB 3.0. Have also attached an aluminium plate on top of the controller chip using hot melt glue to act as a heat sink as i felt that the controller chip was heating up.
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| Heatsink fixed in place with hot melt glue |
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| Blue LED on new board and white power LED on old board |
After doing all this and connecting the HDD to laptop over USB the HDD was detected by the laptop.
But the drive was not mounted i tried every thing but could not mount the drive. After searching on the internet about this the real problem about this drive was revealed.
This USB drive controller chip from Symwave on the adapter encrypts the data before storing to drive even if you never encrypt the drive. The only way to recover the data is to use same replacement board with same hardware revision.
There is a huge problem with this drive and i would suggest anyone who has this drive to backup their data as there is no easy way to recover the data if the controller chip fails as all the data is encrypted.
I was able to save the drive but in process lost all the data, This is the first time this has happened to me. Normally i never buy a branded portable HDD. I always buy USB enclosure separately and and HDD separately. I have lot of USB HDD now as i have replaced the HDD of all my laptop with SSD drives and converted the free HDD into external USB HDD.
This HDD is now working fine, Only thing remaining now is to build new enclosure for the HDD as the original enclosure no longer fits with the modified board. Will build a new enclosure for this HDD in future.
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