Good evening to all.
I have an external hard drive usb3 2TB Western Digital essential who was recognized from the PC one time and other time not, originally thought is usb3 related problem of cable or something because I had problems at the beginning when usb3 was new to the market, drivers Etc.
After a little time i discovered that the SMART were pointing some errors maybe some bad sectors but in a controlled situation and i was thinking that it is time for change hard drive.
Within these days i have a power hypertension on my house from a lightning maybe and my drive stopped being recognized.
I opened the box put the hard disk to PC via SATA straight to the motherboard, it normally recognizes itself but says Unlocated Space and after days of searching to discover that all WD do hardware encryption of files you do not want, through the internal PCB board.
The S / N of the PCB is 4061-705089-001 AF and looking on ebay costs 100-150 euros while similar boards cost 20 much more reasonable. Of course no one does give you a guarantee that it will work for 1000 reasons.
This story was going on for months and i reassembly the hard drive and i was fooling around and suddenly the hard drive recognized normally, i started copying files , i had time to get 10GB and it stopped working. during the copy it disconnected and reconnected every 3 seconds hearing the sound of plug unplug a usb to windows.
I said to search even more, I look at the board with a microscope and i found a charred diode, also the track does not pass any current. I make a bridge and put a new diode, do tests but again same story. I suspect half the electronics are dead but I can change them, the problem is I cant find nowhere Datasheets. i dont know how this thing is connected together and where im supposed to meassure and what are the correct values of voltages etc.
15 years i buy WD hard drives, but i will stop because of those BS, i buyed another one after this drive died and everybody said essentials dosnt encrypt including WD website and when i got the drive in my hand ofc it had a lock on the backside of the WD Book.
there is some photos of the board, i need some schematic or anything to help me fix this board i dont want to buy 10 different spare boards that probably wont even fix my problem cause i've heard from fzabkar there is 2 different chips with absolutely unique firmware, im willing to desolder and resolder my chips thats ok with me i just need some guidance to troubleshoot this board or some datasheet or anything.
im not a HDD guru neither i fooled around with firmware cause im afraid but im willing to find out how to check if someone can help.
the drive spins up correctly when i plug power and usb, it gets recognized on disk managment but without drive letter just a blue box, i cant assign a letter and i never tried to do anything that can do damage from this point. on the computer ofc it dosnt show up. if i try to plug unplug 1000 times maybe 1 time it recognize normally the drive i can start copy files very fast but at some point it just seems to stop, plug unplug it self like rebooting, its very weird its not a consistent problem, i think it might be a corrosion on joints or something cause the board looks nasty, i think its designed to get that much corrosion and i even see on internet everybody has board who look like this its ugly.
- i tried different power supply i have 5 different wd books, i opened them all of them different PCB's.
- i buy a new usb cable
the problem persists.
i know it might have some drive errors, it might also have some slow response from the drive itself or the board, i dont really know, sometimes it seems to work perfect and after some time bam it stops completely. i just want my data.
board one
https://i.gyazo.com/fbd0d932e809872ec94 ... b8c825.jpgboard 2
https://i.gyazo.com/8b632531f17722f5566 ... e3ae95.jpgGenerally
https://i.gyazo.com/ef79b212b842cb992f6 ... c38a01.jpghttps://i.gyazo.com/f048e0de81960defbd5 ... f3f0db.jpgi found out this Symwave <<datasheet>> it dosnt help much
ftp://ftp.smsc.com/pub/Data_Briefs/sw6316db.pdfAnyone with any help would be super appreciated!!
