I'm trying to restore data from a HP SimpleSave 320GB USB external HDD that is no longer recognized by Windows / Linux (no connection noise, nothing). After taking the hard drive out of the enclosure and plugging in a mini-USB cable, a blue LED lights up and a faint click click noise can be heard which repeats itself every second.

When I bypass the USB/SATA PCB (directly connecting via SATA internally), I can see the HDD although only 'unpartitioned' space. Using TestDisk / PhotoRec, I was able to scan the entire drive and even found 20+GB of .gpg files (possibly a coincidence, although I'm not sure). There were no telltale hardware failure noises, HDD sounds and seems to respond perfectly normal.

I understand that the USB to SATA PCB contains an Initio chip which probably means AES 128 'hardware' encryption.

My questions: if this is a hardware problem with the USB / SATA PCB, can I look for another similar PCB and just swap them out, or is there specific information on this PCB that will prevent a new (similiar) PCB from allowing me access to the data on the disk?

Also, are there any other steps I can take to diagnose the USB / SATA PCB as this seems like purely a problem with just the PCB?

Thanks ahead of time, the data on this disk isn't valuable enough for me to pay for a professional to restore so no need to suggest that option.

Very unlikely it is a PCB issue. More like failed internal components.

And you are right about the encryption.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

get another HP Simple Save.

Like HDD Spaz said get another Simple Save box and use this one. If you have pluged into SATA and it shows up as unallocated or partitioned space you need to put it back into a good Simple Save box and go from there. USB that you are using the reason it is clicking is the fact it is not getting enough power to the HDD.

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Iorana Haraharaini