I have saved several laptop HDD that way. Pull them out, buy a USB case and
now instant mini drives.
Gregory
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 11:56 PM
Subject: Re: external hard drives
Sounds
a serious issue. Perhaps the best way forward will be to buy bare drives and
install them into a suitable case. I upgraded my old macbook last summer and
stuck a 500 GB drive in it. The old 160 GB drive has made a splendid little
portable unit! Howard
On 14 October 2011 03:36, Karl Shah-Jenner <shahjen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Just aheads up for those using external hard drives -
I've been asked to recover a small western digital passport hard drive and the
prospects aren't looking good.
Normally I find a standard drive inside
with a USB or firewire interface card attached, and the problem often lies
with this interface card - removing the drive and popping it directly into a
computer I can get on with recovering data and all's good.. Having
standard drives inside external cases can be good too in that price specials
come up that mean it can be cheaper to buy an external drive, pry it from its
case and using it inside a PC or laptop to upgrade or add a drive to the
computer for less cost than buying a bare drive.
However, once I pried
open the case to reveal the actual hard drive I discovered the internal drive
uses an integral usb interface and not a standard sata/pata interface.
This is not cool - not at all. Apparently Samsung has also been doing
this too so it looks like a future trend driven by cost savings at the point
of manufacture.
The problem is that while the drive appears to be fine
and makes all the right noises on startup, the computer doesn't see the drive
at all - which suggests the usb interface has failed.
So as the only
way to easily talk to it is through the now non functional USB and that option
is gone, the next way will be by swapping the hard drives board - something
that rarely had to be done with conventional drives and means sacrificing a
new drive at least once to recover the data on the old drive - or by butching
the drive board to try to pull the serial data off from some point.. which
will not be easy - and even then the data is likely to be encrypted (according
to http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/215681/selfencrypted_drives_set_to_become_standard_fare.html
)
Here's some pics I found of what this interface looks like:
http://i52.tinypic.com/ifsi9e.jpg
http://www.hdd-donor.com/pics/1290113551.jpg
Anyway
this is just a warning that some newer external drives, while conveniently
small and cheap (cough.. that's the new benchmark for everything these days,
right?) may be a bit of a time bomb regarding preservation of data.
My
advice is research any drives before you buy and find out whether they contain
conventional style drives, and avoid these new ones like the
plague
regards
k
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