Shield Hard Drive Circuitry from Power Supply Surges

A friend of mine recently installed a new, greater capacity power supply into his computer and when powering it up, found that the new power supply had blown all four of his hard drives. When he contacted a vendor regarding data recovery, they commented that WD drives, unlike Seagate’s drives, are not shielded from this type of mishap with a metal shield, but instead use a foam divider that melts but provides no protection for the drive circuitry. Needless to say, the foam divider on all four of his drives was indeed melted.

Is it possible to place a shield/protector on the drive to protect from such an occurrence? With more and more larger capacity power supplies, this will become a greater possibiltiy.

Thanks!

2 Likes

This vendor is full of it.  They sold your friend a defective supply and should be buying him new drives.

Are the WD NAS Red drives shielded from magnetic interferance?

I have the 2gb Red NAS drive in a Synology enclosure and is is sitting on top of a Bose sub woofer for my surround system.
Is the NAS drive shielded?
If it is not shielded what precautions should I take? Is there a way to shield it?

I am also finding out if the Bose sub woofer is shielded.

Just want to protect my data.

Thanks.

I’ve seen plenty of teardowns of drives from Seagate, WD and HGST and they all use a foam pad to isolate the PCB from the metal case.

The only drives that actually shielded the PCB was Seagate many moons ago with their Seashell on the barracuda drives.

I still have one,  PATA 80GB.

Unless a thermal pad was used to cover the chip it would reduce flow and thus increase heat.

A cover is not going to help with a voltage spike, only handing of the drive and ESD.