G'day gents.
Before you groan and say "oh not another one of these again", please allow me to summarize as much as I can the situation thus far.
I'm fully aware of the immense complexity of modern drives and that under normal circumstances, there is little that can be done in the way of hardware failure. The drive in question here is a 20GB Hitachi Travelstar from an Xbox 360 that, of course, contains cherished game saves. It was transferred over to a 360 Slim in 2019 and was still working perfectly. After that, I stopped playing as work got in the way so the console just sat there for 2 years until now. When I recently booted it up and no profiles were found, I went near it and heard irregular but unmistakable failed-drive ticking. Powered off immediately. Removed drive. When shaken lightly, it sounds like something is loose in there. So definitely some sort of hardware failure from just...old age?
Professional recovery pulls files off failed drives in a very low level manner and you typically lose all metadata and folder structure. For any PC drive this is still acceptable, but for the Xbox's FATX filesystem this renders the entire recovery moot as none of the recovered data would be usable. It needs to be 100% intact. I contacted all the professional recovery outfits in my region, and none are confident of a recovery for this filesystem and this scenario.
So that leaves me with the last-ditch hail Marys. I placed it in a ziploc, connected to a SATA-USB cable, sealed it and stuck it in a freezer at -18c (-0.4f) for 48 hours. Used a laptop with FATXplorer to try and access the drive. Not detected in Windows. Which leaves actual mechanical intervention, which is what I'm seeking comments for here.
Obviously, open-air is a non starter. So I'd have to build a clean air enclosure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPEa0Wc9iUc. I've also bought a near-identical drive (HTS541020G9SA00) with the same date code and firmware revision. This will be Xbox formatted first to have the allocation tables and whatnot in place. While I've obviously zero experience or business opening hard drives (although I did open a dead drive many years ago just for fun), I'd consider myself pretty handy with delicate devices, replacing iPhone motherboards and stuff like that in the past. So, due caution to be taken. But apart from that I have no idea what to expect to be causing the rattling/failure.
Reasons why this might(?) go well:
- It's a very old and hence more primitive drive
- Single platter, single head
- Has never suffered any shock or abuse
- Identical working replacement available
- Clean air environment
Reasons why not:
- It was previously frozen
- Probably the universe stacked against me on this
Can anyone with experience suggest what might be causing the rattling or failure? The drive has never sustained any damage in its working life and it's only detriment seems to be that it's...just old. Logic board swap doesn't seem logical as the problem is coming from inside the drive casing. Motor swap? Head swap? Some kind of retaining clip? Platter swap would be the absolute last resort.
Candid thoughts and comments most welcome.