Well I have a big problem,
my 500gb WD mybook that i just archived all my stuff to .. got the wrong power cable plugged into it (which is bullcrap because their power cable should be more proprietary and there should be a watt/voltage indicator on the external drive) the drive was not powered on and the drive heads never engaged ... so anyways I extracted the SATA drive from the case and I plugged it into the bare drive into the computer and I smelled a burning smell w/ a little smoke coming from the SATA connector and i quickly unplugged the drive and my heart sank to the floor ... i knew the drive was fried ... I had all this space for a reason and i have the damn thing filled up .. now I have never worked on a drive before but how much effort does it take to replace the pcb on the drive? what else could cause smoke from the connector and once a pcb smokes its pretty much toast right??

thanks so much

when your drive is smoking you should be able to see components that could have been overheated or even blown up.

I will disassemble the drive case and disconnect the PCB board from the drive and post pictures of the SATA connector that started smoking when I plugged it in

sure