Can I transplant MyPassport Essential 750 GB?

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Hi,

It’s a few days that my Passport Essential SE 750 GB Usb 3.0 is not recognized by any system that I connect it to. I hear efforts to try and spin up but after a few consecutive tries, it fails and then stops completely.

I doubt there has been any loss of the data, but I guess it is the SATA surface or a PCB and that is what drives me crazy. That the data is there but unaccessible. So I first bought an external 2.5’’  SATA case, only to realise that the Essential series features not a standard, removable  SATA connector, but on the contrary, it is somehow integrated with the disk and cannot be removed in case of failure. I would have to unscrew and detach the entire PCB under the disk.

So a second guess is this. If I take my friend’s passport (same model but 500 GB) and “transplant” the entire pcb to my own disk, will it  work? We had bought them from the same shop, the same day. (I know of differences in firmware which may cause incompatibility)

I surely cannot give 500 Euros for a burnt PCB or SATA connection. Actually its not even “Data recovery” what I want to do, so I am looking for alternatives…

2

Before switching boards I would contact WD and ask about a Power Boosted cable and see if that helps. These drives are extremely sensitive to voltage and a lot of PCs use wimpy power supplies. Did you try this drive on a different PC? The board that has the USB port provides hardware encryption whether you use Smartware or not. Switching might work but that will void his warranty. Read some of the posts by fzabkar he is the expert on theose boards and explains about them.

Joe