I attached 2 WD Caviar Black HDDs to a new PS cable which caused both of them to instantly burn chips on the PCB, killing both drives. I can't name the chips on a HDD PCB but on each drive, one of the large, main chips was burned up. I submitted one of the drives to a PCB replacement service. The diagnosis from the PCB service was,

"We have evaluated the Western Digital drive with model number WD6401AALS-00L3B2
and have determined that the Preamp of the drive has failed. The Preamp is the chip on
the headstack. We are unable to correct this failure by removing the ROM chip from
the PCB and adapting it to a new PCB. We would not be able to offer a repair for this
drive at this time. At this time the only service we can provide is data recovery."

Is this typical damage for a power surge that would burn chips on a PCB? Would they need to open the drive to verify that the preamp was dead? I'm not suspicious of the diagnosis or the company or anything like that, I just like to double check everything I hear from repair companies especially if it's the difference in a $90 repair and an $800 recovery.

Thanks in advance.

It's possible that it has blown the preamp especially in a wd drive and if smooth is burnt it's likely. Sounds like where you sent it really only does logical recovery. 800 usd is a bit on the high side but yes you're out of the 90 usd range.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

You can often (usually?) determine if a preamp is dead by measuring the resistance between ground and each of its supply pins. You don't need to remove the cover to do this.

Catastrophic failures in Western Digital PCBs:
https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1119

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks. For a full explanation, I sent it to a PCB replacement service. They diagnose it and if a PCB replacement won't fix the drive, they send it to a sister company who does cleanroom data recovery.

Thank you for this link; it explains everything. My SMOOTH looks exactly like the pictures of the examples of SMOOTH failures resulting from an overvoltage on the +5V supply which also takes out the preamp.

I guess I will test the pins on any SATA PS cable before I use from now on. Plugged hundreds of HDDs onto PS cables without ever having a bad one.

Please don't tell me this was Donor Drives. If so, then you may have received an "email template".

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25524&p=173670&hilit=email+template#p173670

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

ding ding ding

See my edit.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I have a post that's waiting for moderation for some reason. My drives' SMOOTH looks just like the 5v overvoltage in the link you sent in the previous post and my incident sounds like a 5v overvoltage on an internal drive per the known issue with WD which would cook the preamp. I guess it might be worth my $12 return postage to corroborate their diagnosis, which is exactly why I posted here.

Edit: I did in fact talk to someone on the phone after I got my diagnosis and quote for cleanroom recovery. She informed me of the preamp failure.

Thanks for all the excellent, prompt responses. What a great community.

Last post: any advice on what happened? I know any cable can be bad at any time, but I've never had a bad PS SATA cable. The cable is long gone, but is there anything else I need to look out for?

You answered that in your first post They're not all wired the same and using the wrong ones blows so many drive pcbs it's just not funny any more. You're just unlucky regarding the damage.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

Thank you. I've heard of different pins on SATA PS cables but almost didn't believe until this happened. It's so stupid that different pins could fit the same adapter, I'm not even sure what to think. So I guess I will put a multimeter on every single SATA PS cable I use from now on. Unless I'm missing something, my god that's stupid.

Don't beat yourself up about it. The stupid people are the engineers at WD who were more concerned with protecting their diode than they were about protecting your data. Then there are the PSU manufacturers who were either too stupid to see the obvious pitfalls of non-standardisation, or who were more concerned with selling their proprietary cable at their price.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.