Chipsang........
First see, the thing you are talking about differs from vendor to vendor. And as far as compatibility of donor PCB's are concern, then yes, apart from just Model No. and F/W Rev. , other things also does matter. But, you are still right at your place. As you have said, that you never bother about parameters other then Model and F/W, then in this condition, the critical parameters automatically gets "Matched". Though you are not bothering to match 'em, but they have been putted in each other perfectly. For example, In seagate U drives (Not containing serial flash, only parallel drives), one must match the Middle Alphabet letter of the PCB code. Though, in the same F/W, it automatically gets matched upto 90%. That's why you never had to face any such problem of incompatibility.
Second thing, to suck out the data one time is not the big deal. Because such incompatibility issues has rather high chances of creating problem in drives routine work, not in single time recovery. For instance, in some drives, some of the adaptives data is embedded in drive's ROM. Thus, after replacing it with the same ROM Rev., you will read the data first time without any hassle. But, when it will come for the drive to perform routine jobs, then it may or may not perform as it would do with the original ROM. While, this error will not be creating some high profile problems, but may perform in a differ way as it should. For example, after replacing the logic board in a drive, wear in the actuator bearings causes slight deviations in the distance the arm moves across the platter. As a result, the current that was once required to move the actuator to a certain track is no longer sufficient to move the arm precisely. But this thing will not be noticable in a short span of time, as, not much to bother for the recovery purpose.
And last thing, the answer of your question. Adaptives data can be called a set of rules basically for Head and Pre-Amplifier, which the drive has to follow. Which mainly contains settings and limits for the logical and physical routine job. For instance, some major settings can be name (which could be modified also) are RWC (Read Write Current), WPC (Write Pre Compensations), Head Bias, Zone Info. etc etc. And this info is often embedded in drive's ROM also. Which could or could not be read in a separate manner. In some drives, you have to read the whole ROM for this thing, and in some drives, you can read that stuff separately. A good example of this are Quantum drives. In which, many of the F/W data is stored in drive's ROM as Configuraion Pages, which can be read and modified separately (Your Adaptives Data also). Like, the Configuration Page No. 10 usually contains this Adaptives Data settings, so, this must be present uniformely in the drive for the fine work.
So, as a conclusion, ignoring other parameters apart from F/W NEVER fries your drive, but may lead to drive's malfunction in future. So, the data recovery companies there are somewhat right at their place.
Hope this helps.
Regards
harddiskbug@yahoo.com
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