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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

The week of fried drives (help!)

B

Brent J. Craig

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So I somehow managed to trash 3 hard drives this week.

Drive 1 was a brand new quad-interface Lacie 1TB. It was 1am at the end of an 18 hour day and I had just spent 90 minutes coping the day's footage to it. I was reaching for the phone to order a wake up call and knocked the drive from its standing position to laying on it's side. It literally tipped 3 inches. Instant dead drive. Luckily I didn't lose anything, I just had to make a new backup drive to send to the lab.


Drive 2 was an old Maxtor portable. Plugged it in and got nothing. Not a big deal - I can't remember what was on it.


Drive 3 is the one I need your help on. I was hurrying to make a Fedex pickup deadline and plugged the wrong power supply into one of those Lacie Porsche drives. Smoke came out, which I assume is not good! It is worth noting that the Dlink DNS123 network-attached-storage unit has the exact same plug as the Lacie's but with different voltages!

Drive 3 was my only backup of a bunch of irreplaceable photos.

I opened up the Lacie and tried the drive with a couple of different SATA controllers and it doesn't even seem to spin up.

Here's my question, it appears that drives are only connected to their circuit boards by 4 wires. Do you think I could find an identical drive (Samsung HD500LJ) and simply swap out the boards? I would assume whatever I burnt out would not have affected the data on the drive itself, just the controller board.

Does anyone here have experience in doing this or opinions on what I could try?

Thanks,

BJC
 
I would try being more careful. :sarcasm:

But seriously, you may have just smoked the power supply. I would try taking the drive out and mounting it internally, if you have a desktop machine.

If not, you can get drive docks that allow you to mount the drive extenally:

http://tinyurl.com/DriveDocks

(unless you meant you tried this already and the drive still won't spin up.)

Hope this helps.
 
So the drive is hardwired to another circuit board?
Or is the drive CB shot?
Is the drive removable?
For portable drives I recommend G-Tech
I have about 20 G-Tech G-raids.
I remember having a Lacie years ago and it
was always having problems.
 
There are drive recovery companies that do this.

There may be differences between the same model of hard drive, i.e. different revisions.
 
Dude, this thread just made me decide to set a couple of hours aside tomorrow for some much needed double or triple backing up.
 
Yes, replacing the circuit board is the first thing the data recovery firms try.

Consider building / buying a RAID subsystem. Make sure it has a minimum of 5 running hard drives and one "hot spare".

Get a quality RAID 5 controller and 7 matching hard drives. The 7th goes on the shelf so when one drive fails and the 6th switches from "hot spare" to part of the RAID you won't have to run around trying to find a new "hot spare". LOL!

Hang it all off of a high quality constant voltage UPS with full sine wave, not some $40 piece of Chinese crapola.

Contact a local custom computer builder to help you design and implement it. Then if you have an issue you can walk in their door with the box under your arm!

Terry Thomas...
the photographer
Atlanta, Georgia USA
www.TerryThomasPhotos.com
* Unit Stills Photographer *
 
Brent, Replacing the PCB will in most cases fix the problem you are having. There is a chance that some of the data could be corrupt, but for all intensive purposes you just fried the circut board. We have done this plenty of times in the lab and a quick swap of the PCB is all it takes to fix the problem. Just make sure you buy the exact same model drive and you should be ok. Good Luck!
 
Get a quality RAID 5 controller and 7 matching hard drives.
Click to expand...

This is where I mention that somebody I know had a RAID 5 with 2 failed drives (= data lost). Thankfully they had LTO backups.
 
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