For an IDE drive, the new board has to have the same microcode revision level. This will be printed somewhere on the board IIRC. I don’t remember how to identify it though. I think the abbreviation was MCL. If it’s not the same, I don’t think it will work at all, but you can give it a shot.
I’ve never heard an HDD rev - if by that you mean rev up and down. If that’s what happening, then I would say it is definitely the controller card/integrated electronics.
As for the breathing hole, I’m pretty sure that’s filtered. I seriously doubt that it’s just a hole in the case.
I don’t know how else to describe it.
Imagine you sit in a car and press the accelerator just 20 degrees for a couple of seconds. Then you take your foot off the pedal for a couple of seconds.
That’s what it sounds like my drive is doing, repeatedly.
I just need to get the little guy in there to press down fully on the gas
I don’t know.
I got the notion that hard drives fling particles off the platters from this guy. Who, despite using the word “degredate”, seems to really know HDDs.
It sounds like it is detecting a problem and is intentionally spinning the drive back down. Either that or it’s just not able to regulate the speed properly.
You can try swapping controller boards, but otherwise there isn’t much you can do to fix this. Hard drive components are very small and can’t be easily tinkered with, especially in a home environment. You need special tools and a clean room to do something like a platter swap. This isn’t something that even someone who is mechanically inclined can figure out how to do on the fly.
I didn’t watch the entire video, but the part around where he says degredate does actually seem to be technically (if not grammatically) correct.
The guy in the video is correct that you can run a drive outside of its case in air, and when I’ve done this it has worked for a surprisingly long time (and is fun to watch). It is a bit of an accident waiting to happen though, and I wouldn’t recommend doing it to anyone. It’s a great way to ruin the platter surface.
The guy in the video has a point that the drive won’t instantly fail if it isn’t in a clean room, but that still doesn’t mean that exposing the drive to the air is a good thing. As for the hole, dzero is correct. The hole in hard drives is covered with a filter so that it lets air in and out of the drive but prevents dust from going through the hole. It’s not just an open hole.
So as well as a working drive to be my new hard drive, I’ve bought two drives:
A broke 4.3GB drive, for practice + giggles
A refurb 160GB toshiba, same model number as the broke drive, to get the controller board from
Drive 1: Strangely, this drive works. I bought it for 2 pounds and it was sold as “not found”, but using volume-repair software I got it working, and all the disk checks seem to indicate it’s fine.
Not sure what to do with it now, 4GB would be a tiny flash drive. Hacking it to bits though feels wrong.
Drive 2: Annoyingly, I can’t get the screws off! I got a few off but the rest are super-tightened and it’s such a tiny screw head I can’t really get much purchase.
This wouldn’t have bode well for swapping the motor…
So, just so there is some conclusion to this thread, I finally got the data from my knackered hard drive!
I’ll try my best to make this information helpful to anyone else, because, on the face of it, it isn’t:
I never managed to get the circuit board off the second drive… Lesson: It’s really easy to ruin the heads of those fiddly little screws. If you don’t have 00 and 000, CR-V tipped philips screwdrivers to hand, don’t attempt to unscrew a hard drive.
…just taking the board off the original drive, then putting it back on again was the only significant change prior to the damn thing working! Lessons: A drive may spring into life long after you’ve given up on it. Try reseating the board (or perhaps dusting it with compressed air). Problems which seem definitely mechanical may not be.
As for tools, different brands use different screws - Western Digital tends to use T6 and T8 Torx, for example. Definitely pick up a set of tiny Torx drivers if that’s the case - Home Depot sells a set with 8 interchangeable bits ranging from T4 to T15 for six bucks.
My wager would be on a bad connection between the controller board and the drive mechanism, and just removing and replacing the board was enough to clean it up.
Regardless of why it’s working now, don’t trust it. Pull your data off and scrap the wretched thing. Drives are too cheap to worry about when it will fail again.
