My two 2TB MyBook's failed at the same time

[sba923]

My archiving process involves making two copies of the data on two different external HDDs.

One of those pairs is a pair of WD MyBook 2TB drives.

They both failed on me on the same day.

One was intermittently disconnecting, and I failed to salvage all the data before it reached the state of the other drive: “The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.”

I’ve come across an old post by @Keith about failed solder joints: http://community.wd.com/t/my-computer-cannot-detect-or-recognized-my-book/2883

But the picture there is not accessible: Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.

Can someone post instructions on how to fix those solder joints (I have a SMD hot-air blower)?

TBH I fear that the incorrect I/O has permanently damaged the NTFS filesystem, so I’ll probably have to use something like IsoBuster to attempt recovery of the data I was not able to copy over before the 2nd drive became unreadable.

Any thoughts on the topic would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I don’t understand why the SATA-USB3 board in those drives encrypts the data (making it inaccessible when connecting the bare drive to a SATA port or another SAT-USB3 interface). If the MyBook gets stolen, the decryption means is available to the thief…

[Vegan]

The encryption defeats the idea of removing the disk and using a desktop to recover the files

[mikes2]

An I/O device error is an indicator of a failing hard drive or USB media. Failure could be logical or mechanical such as file system corruption or stuck actuator arm. Additionally, a faulty wire, disk errors, severe drive corruption, corrupt driver, and hardware damage could also lead to the hard drive device I/O error.

To fix the I/O error, you can try the below methods:

1. Check if the drive is connected properly
2. Reset the BIOS
3. Re-install the drive’s drivers
4. Try connecting to a different port/PC
5. Use data recovery software to avoid further damage

An I/O device error may lead to a severe data loss situation, so to avoid such situation its advised to recover data from such drive before fixing the issue. To recover data from such drive you may need help of trustworthy data recovery tool such as Stellar Data Recovery software.

Hope this helps!

[sba923]

These are very generic points.

In this specific issue, there is a documented hardware issue with the long-term reliability of the SATA-to-USB3 interface board in the WD MyBook enclosures. The HDDs themselves have no issues (I’m verifying them periodically via the built-in extended SMART tests). And the problem with the defect in the interface board is that some of the actual writes to the HDDs have been corrupted, causing the data within the disks to become corrupted.

Thanks to WD’s completely useless (if you ask me) idea to encrypt the data within the interface board, recovering the data by connecting the perfectly healthy HDDs via another SATA-to-USB3 interface cannot be done.

[LADessert]

You should stop trying to do anything with that disk and get in touch with a professional data recovery process if this is truly highly vital data, as you can be making things worse by further taxing the drive. （from google, Fix the Fatal Device Hardware Error)
Steps to recover files from a corrupted hard drive:

• Scan the hard drive partition.
• When the scan completes, find the lost files on the hard drive.
• Select wanted files that you lost on the drive and click Recover.

[fzabkar]

EaseUS can’t fix “fatal device hardware errors”. That’s just spammy nonsense.