I appreciate all the responses and information. I will have to put off the PCB removal until tomorrow since I could not locate my precision torx screwdriver set I got stashed somewhere.
Zero Alpha, you said something about fuses. I found some info right here on these forums and some user called "cheadledatarecovery", a data recovery specialist apparently, said and I quote: "Western Digital drives do not have fuse/diode protection (unlike Seagate & Samsung)". Is this correct?
harddrivespecialistm, I have contacted another data recovery specialist in the meantime. The first place I contacted were Chicago Data Recovery Corp @
http://www.chicagodatarecoverycorp.com ...Their estimate was $1500-$4300 with free evaluation. However, they aren't even located
in Chicago where I live. That was pretty dishonest of them to being with. The rep on the phone kept contradicting himself: he kept saying that RAID0 recoveries are easy but very costly because they are difficult. (?!) I felt the entire time like I was talking to a sleazy car mechanic.
After posting here I looked for another data recovery specialist that was actually in my city. I googled and found Promise Chicago Data Recovery Services who also do free evaluations, however the rep on the phone told me that the repair would cost $2000-$2500 at a absolute minimum because it was a disk that belonged to a RAID array. He didn't explain it and I didn't ask why.
At this point I might actually visit the Promise Chicago Data Recovery Services just to get the free evaluation. Although I doubt they will actually tell me what is wrong unless I look like I'm about to shell out $2500 or more. (like any car mechanic)
Again, if it is just the fuses, it would be great. As for moving the MCU, I do have some ancient hobbyist experience with MCU programming (Zilog MCU's were my passion once upon a time) but I doubt anything I have stashed in my closet is compatible or sufficient for whatever proprietary stuff is on that WD PCB.