Don't Swap That Board!

If you’ve ever seen an actual hard drive, you are familiar with their basic shape and construction. On the underside of all hard drives is a printed circuit board, or PCB. It is this board that often contains the drive’s firmware and information about bad sectors; it also controls the flow of power and data to and from the drive. In many instances of hard drive failure, there is nothing wrong mechanically, but the PCB itself has failed.

In the old days it was possible to swap the PCB from an identical, functional drive into a broken one, and recover the data that way. This was practical and useful on drives up to perhaps two gigabytes in capacity. Now that hard drives aren’t even manufactured in capacities less than 160 gigabytes, it is not advisable to swap these boards.

Older drives had self-test data, tables of bad sectors and other diagnostic and operational information on the platters of the drive itself; today, in order to squeeze the greatest capacity out of hard drives and for reasons I won’t even begin to speculate, the information is stored in nonvolatile solid state memory on the PCB itself.

If a modern drive has its PCB swapped out, it may seem to function (spin up and make normal noises), but once it’s spun up and had its data port hooked to something, the data will likely be completely corrupted and totally unrecoverable.

Data recovery at Small Dog Electronics is done with the utmost care, using the most sophisticated software tools available. We are often able to recover the vast majority of data from each drive that comes through our doors, at prices a tiny fraction of those charged by professional outfits like DriveSavers. This said, we won’t be able to recover your data if your drive is clicking or grinding, and odds are DriveSavers won’t be able to either.

If your computer is under warranty, we can replace your hard drive at no cost to you while your failed drive is being worked on by DriveSavers. They really are miracle workers.

When it comes right down to it, there is no reason for anyone to need data recovery. Hard drives are very inexpensive now, and now that we have Time Machine, we don’t even have to think about backing up. Give us a ring or swing by a Small Dog store, and we’ll design a solution that meets your needs and budget!