My Passport SE interface board swap

My 1TB USB3.0 Passport stopped working.  It is not recognized by my laptop or other laptops when i plug it in.  the power LED comes on solid and the drives spin whn i plug it in.  With other hard drives I’ve been able to buy an encolsure with a new interface board SATA connector and swap them out.  This model does not have the SATA connector it appears to be some proprietary design.  based on this I am unable to try the $20 enclosure solution to get my data off of the hard drive.  Data recovery will likely by in the $500 range so I’m exploring other alternatives.  I disassembled the drive (I understand this voids warranty) and I see the interface board goes from USB to spring pins that interface to the drives.  What I’d like to do is buy a new passport SE, disassemble it (Again voiding warranty) and place teh new known good interface board with my hard drive.  This will cost me only $100.

My question is, ASSUMING that my drives are not damaged, and that my failure point is the interface board, will this work?  Does the interface boards and drives have IDs and are only able to work with the mated pair created in manufacturing?  Before I spend the $100, taking the risk that my drives are OK, I’d like to understand that this is possible rather than find out even if they both were good it wouldnt have worked anyway.  

I’ll try to enclose a couple of pictures as well, this is my first time on WD community.  

I understand WD cannot gaurantee me this will work and I’ll be able to retrieve my data given the unknown status of my drive, but I’d like to understand that if all parts are working, swapping the interface baord from another drive will work or not.

Thanks

Hi, the Passport SE has hardware encryption so you might fix the one that has your files but the computer will recognize the data as garbage. For a second opinion you can also send a PM to fzabkar, he’s the resident guru for this type of stuff.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/AAG/ENG/4178-705135.pdf

Is the encryption handled in one of the ICs and can i swap that IC from old “bad” board to new board to get me passed the encryption issue?

Don’t know if that is possible. :confounded: