Immediately after connecting the 5 and 12V sockets of a SATA/IDE interface to a 3.5" SATA external hard drive, with the USB2 cable still disconnected, I felt a burning sensation in my fingers that were handling the disk; I left it immediately and since I saw some sparks and a strong burning smell coming from the electronic board, I unplugged the 220V plug. Now I don't see anything abnormal on the SATA interface, just the smell on the 12V plug (HD side), faded away after a few hours: it's better to throw it away or I can try to use it with another drive?

I am a newbie. Just based on some basic knowledge, could it be you connected the 12v to the 5v? Could be some diode burnt out due to this maybe. i think , if you remove the PCB and post the picture of it here may be of help for some of the experts to give you a clearer picture

hi Axis937, thank you, the connectors were correctly plugged; I already threw away the HD, my concern is for the SATA interface: it was working fine with other HDs just before the event: it was connected to the burnt HD via USB cable, but the other end of the cable was still disconnected from the computer.

Hiya, you may want to post the image is the sata interface and pcb. Quenches everyone buds to know what it looks like at the current state and maybe a solution.