I am sick to my stomach over this. I was just building a new Windows 10 PC with a ton of hard drives for the sole reason of not just a gaming machine, but one where I would store all of my data and I was going to begin a backup process tomorrow. This is the worst timing/luck ever!

Videos of my two 5 year old daughters and my two three year old sons are gone, as well as some VHS tapes I ripped that had the only remaining videos of my sister who passed away not long ago (I was literally planning on backing these all up TOMORROW). I have photos backed up to Amazon's cloud but they don't accept videos so those are all gone.

Here is what happened: I had a desktop gaming PC that had 8 hard drives in it. The CPU (Intel 9700k) processor I installed last year died, so I replaced it yesterday. I also bought a new PSU because I had 3 motherboards die (plus the CPU) in the span of a year, so I figured my PSU was somehow frying my hardware. So I installed the new CPU and PSU yesterday and my PC finally booted up for the first time in a while.

However, I noticed only 4 of my hard drives showed up in Windows. I went into my BIOS, and had the same thing. Not recognized.

I took the 4 problematic drives out of my case and tried to power them up in a friend's PC and had the same issue. Zero power. I also tried an external USB hard drive caddy (one that uses wall power of course since these are all 3.5" drives) and they simply aren't receiving power.

I believe somehow my old power supply fried them just as my CPU went down. Either that or the APC UPS battery backup device I have is somehow frying the insides of my computer. I have already ordered a new APC UPS battery backup device just because of how paranoid I am as to what could have caused this. It's definitely not the new PSU as I have tested the voltages on each SATA line and they are all within spec.

Here are the drives that died:

Drive 1 front:
https://i.imgur.com/aiChtaR.jpg
Drive 1 back:
https://i.imgur.com/B4xVcE4.jpg

Drive 2 front:
https://i.imgur.com/fLHZHaB.jpg
Drive 2 back:
https://i.imgur.com/zAMH6ss.jpg

Drive 3 front:
https://i.imgur.com/vEOIdp7.jpg
Drive 3 back:
https://i.imgur.com/GnD6c8j.jpg

Drive 4 front:
https://i.imgur.com/1SlUbpe.jpg
Drive 4 back:
https://i.imgur.com/HS5O8KI.jpg
(I didn't want to embed the images because they are huge and I didn't want this thread to be impossible to read)

These are all 8TB Western Digital drives that came from Western Digital Elements/Essentials/MyBook USB enclosures that I shucked and took the drives out of, meaning they have no warranty. But it's not the $120 I spent on each drive that I care about. It's getting the data off of them.

Now normally if I had dropped the drives or they were giving me the click of death I would just break down and cry for a few days because I don't have the thousands of dollars it would cost to "revive" these drives. But it's the fact that they simply aren't receiving power that gives me hope.

I took the PCB from one of the 8TB drives that is still good and swapped it onto one of the drives that do not receive power. To my delight, the drive began to spin! No clicks of death or anything. However, Windows 10 could not recognize the drive. I am guessing this is because the PCB wasn't a 100% exact match (it was pretty darn close from what I could see in regards to the little numbers on the back).

Is there some way for me to get identical PCB replacements for these 4 drives? If so, does it require a BIOS swap like I know Seagate drives require? I am pretty handy with a soldering iron but that's about it. I am not sure I would be able to desolder any of the extremely tiny chips I saw on the PCB when I tried the swap.

Any advice would be extremely appreciated. I haven't eaten in over a day because of how sick to my stomach I am over this and am praying these WD PCBs aren't "locked down" to a drive or something.

Thank you so much in advance.

You appear to have done this:

Warning: do not interchange modular PSU cables:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=2545

The result is probably this:

TVS Diode FAQ:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=86

If you are lucky, the damage will be restricted to the TVS diode(s), probably the 5V TVS diode, and its associated fuse.

Could we see the interesting side of the PCBs, ie the side with the components on it?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks so much for the reply. I got maybe 2 hours of sleep last night because of how distraught I am over all of this.

I've never had a modular PSU before so it's definitely not that. I think it was just an old janky PSU that I had that was on its way out (I had a lot of PC parents recently fry on me, like a CPU and motherboard so it's probably all linked to all that).

I am praying it's just what you are saying. What I can do is I can scan the other side of the PCBs tomorrow so they will be super high quality. Unfortunately my 3 year old is sleeping in the room where our scanner is so it will have to wait until tomorrow morning.

I know I said it already but thank you so, so much for the reply. And to anyone else who is reading and considering giving me a helping hand. It is giving me hope.

How, if he had "shucked" them from the enclosure and connected them to his PC via SATA power?

I think 8 HHD's in a PC is optimistic IMHO, 8TB notwithstanding...

First make sure that SATA power connector on the new PSU doesn't have orange cable going to it. If it does try to use old PSU to power those drives.

In fact these drives are Hitachi's, most likely He filled....Compare the first two lines on the small labels of the PCB's.
If they match, you can replace a bad PCB with a good one by swapping the Flash chip.

I forgot about that. Thanks.

Power Disable Feature (SATA 3.2+ / 3.3):
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=2094

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

That's what I thought at first but I am using SATA y-splitters and they do not even pass anything to the 3.3v pins, so this definitely isn't the issue unfortunately.



Ok so as you requested, here are pics of the other side of all 4 PCBs: https://imgur.com/a/eIfQ4nL

Let me know if you need better pictures or something.

Thank you so much for your willingness to help.