I have a HDD 4tb Toshiba drive I had in a Raid 1 NAS device (NSA320) that failed in the raid and I replaced it and rebuilt the raid and life was good.

I have finally moved to a better custom TrueNas scale setup with 2x 8tb HDD in a Raid 1 with weekly encrypted backups to online cloud. I have 2 4tb Toshiba HDDs that match closely with the dead hdd.

I want to try to recover data from it mainly because I want the experience… Let me explain. The drive clicks, yes you can hear the disks spin up to speed and then you hear clicking as it’s trying to read.

I want to know if I can start off trying to swap the circuit board to rule that out without much issue? I have true HEPA filter air purifiers and I can rotate and angle them to have a positive pure air pressure if I need to open it up and swap out the arms.

Is it worth trying? Anything I should know or think about in my decision to try this?

  • remotelove@lemmy.caEnglish
    12·
    4 months ago

    I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.

    It never worked.

    • 0^2@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      7·
      4 months ago

      Yeah… That probably because either the drive thought it was falling and triggered the HDD falling mechanism (often found on 2.5" hdd) which would move the arms off the disks to prevent them from hitting it and damaging the platters to unrecoverable states.

      Or if done on 3.5" without this feature built into it, could just damage the platters.

      Would probably be less risky to open it up and unstick the arms yourself.

      • remotelove@lemmy.caEnglish
        6·
        4 months ago

        It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.

        • XTL@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          2·
          4 months ago

          I once had a hard drive of some particular vintage that wasn’t able to start. I did actually get it running with a hammer tap. Got the remains of data out and replaced the drive. It was nothing special, a Unix system drive with nothing that wasn’t on tape, but I just had to see if I could fix a hard drive with a hammer.

          I also remember one admin who would often be seen walking between computer maintenance room and workshop wing with drives and a blacksmiths hammer labelled “format”.