Failed Toshiba P300 3TB harddisk

[flode]

Hi all,

Yesterday while I was doing some video editing on my computer, suddenly windows just froze and wouldn't react to any keypresses, not even ctrl-alt-del. So I turned off the machine and after it started up again, I found that one of my Toshiba P300 3TB harddisk disappeared. My OS is running on a 1TB NVMe SSD.

Anyway I tried rebooting into bios and surely, the bios couldn't detect that particular harddisk, I have 5 other HDD in my system and that's the only drive not detected. I tried swapping cable and ports, but the harddisk is dead.

The harddisk is about 2 years old.

What could have caused the failure? PCB problem?

Thanks in advance.

[fzabkar]

If it spins up, then the PCB is most probably OK.

[flode]

It doesn't spin up, so probably it is the PCB fault?

My normal routine is to transfer data to new harddisk every two years and use the old harddisk as scratch drives, but this drive failed me within two years (date of manufacture 20Dec2020) and could not wait for my new x300s to arrive lol --- just one day before the new harddisk arrive. I have another identical P300 harddisk in service(I usually buy harddisk in pairs). I am backing up the other P300 data into a newly arrived X300 4TB harddisk and will use the pair P300 as a donor drive.

I also don't buy two harddisk together, I try to get them from different batches. Another X300 4TB and X300 8TB on the way from another vendor, going to backup all my drives now.

The P300 is still under warranty and I know whatever I am going to do is going to void it but I cannot send the drive to professional service as there are NDA files in it. Either I retrieve or lost the files myself, but I cannot risk the data being given to a third-party.

Many would have suggested going for RAID 1, but then I thought my routine of regular replacement would be better instead of spending more money maintaining the RAID 1 mirror.

Anyway, I will post pictures soon. I hope I can get some help troubleshooting the PCB board. I can live with the data lost but if I could save some files, that would be great.

[flode]

Sorry I have to correct myself, I disconnected all harddisks and then connected the failed harddisk and it spins up. So as you suggested, the PCB is ok. I openned up the harddisk and see some scratches, so I think probably that the head crashed.

Is there a way to wipe the data before sending it in for service?

[fzabkar]

You will need a multimeter. PCB problems are not difficult to resolve, even if you need a replacement PCB.

[Green Slime]

Just keep running the drive after it's been opened outside a cleanroom and you are well on the way to wiping all data

If you want to really make sure it's wiped, put a few deep scratches on every surface with a screwdriver, no one is ever going to be recovering it.