Secrets to FIXING YOUR EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE! Important Information on "dead" EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES!

Author: Theoria Apophasis
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Thousands of people every day experience what at first seems that their external USB or Thunderbolt HD, either 2.5" portable or 3.5" desktop model is dying, is dead, or all hope is lost for it. Good news is that you have roughly a greater than 50-60% chance that your external hard drive is perfectly fine! The great news at the end of the tunnel of an apparently failed or failing external hard drive. When checked on another computer, and with no need for spending money on data extraction expertise or software, the very likely case is that your external USB or thunderbolt HD is in fact fine, and merely the card interface, or SATA bridge card has failed or is failing. Keeping a HD dock around handy, or cheaper still a $20 hard drive enclosure or a SATA to USB connector can be a real life saver in getting your drive back to use, when the drive itself is fine, and merely its interface card has gone bad. The SATA bridge card inside a USB external HD has a very high failure rate in general What exactly is the SATA bridge card in your external HD? In the middle to late of 2009, most all external hard drives both in 2.5" and 3.5" reached the shelves in SATA III. These small SATA cards or "bridges" are used to translate between the hard drives' interfaces and the enclosures' external ports (USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire). Additionally these small bridges not only transfer power but also of course the data. Unfortunately these SATA bridge cards have a very high failure rate as they are burdened with shuffle power and data. Literally these little unreliable and fragile cards are the power conduits and the nervous system for all external HD data transfer.

Comments

  1. Don't Curse!!!
  2. Thank you so so much. thanks to you i got my data back.
  3. thanks man
  4. I wish I had found this a couple years ago when our Iomega quit being recognized. Powers up fine but can't read it. Bought a Western Digital that I obviously didn't need to purchase. Will be picking up a cable to retrieve that lost data and back up the WD!
  5. Hi, my lap top hard disk's reading head stuck in the middle of disk
    plate while this latter keeps spinning , working ,, there is some sound but just for few seconds at starting but no clicking or bip, ... I hope i was clear describing the problem ...thanks for helping
  6. I am going to try the fix on a seagate.
    Shame on Seagate they didn't even stutter asking for $500 to recover data and did not blink or offer to help. I didn't know the name of the Sata bridge, told seagate I thought it was the piece on the connector piece on the drive.
  7. what's the best/ relable HHD hard drive to go for ?
  8. Hi. I have 2 Seagate external drives and something really strange has happened. After changing around my connections to my UPS battery backup a day later 1 external drive has no power and the other stops copying data halfway. (In the same week I also did happen to spill a bit of water on my laptop keyboard but dried it quick). -And I can't figure out what's gone wrong. Do you know anything about what it could be?
    -There's no way a UPS can damage an external drive if it's connected like it should to a surge protected socket right?
    -The one that stopped copying data halfway was really hot
    -Thnx
  9. Hey Theoria, I have the Toshiba Canvio Basic 1TB, I just opened it and found out that it comes with the SATA bridge integrated with the controller board. Is there something else I can do? Like swapping the controller board with another that comes with the SATA port? Please Help!
  10. Frak! I just opened up my Toshiba Canvio and the SATA card is integrated into the board :(
  11. So are you saying the problem might be the Santa bridge card? Oh and one more question......cuss much? Good grief!
  12. Hi big man, just wanted to say thank you for uploading this video, I managed to recover all the content on my portable hard drive...
  13. I agree with what you said about WD. Their hard drives, especially their external ones like My Passport, are complete crap. I had a 500gb My Passport which I rarely use and only had for less than a year and suddenly it failed for no reason. Plugged in the USB and PC not reading it but you can feel a faint run on the device itself. Wrote to WD tech support and they sent me several USB plugs including one with 2 USB plugs on one end to be connected to 2 USB ports for added power but that didn't help either. So my last resort was to open the casing to hopefully be able to at least put it in an enclosure or an adapter but to my disappointment it's configuration is not made to be connected to standard sata. The only connection it has is the USB 3.0 female port and that's it. No sata bridge card like on this video. The USB 3.0 female connection is completely integrated in the hard drive's main structure so anyone who has a failed WD My Passport won't have any luck retrieving their stored files if it fails. So steer clear of WD shit products.
  14. Thank you for good information but concentrate man and stick to the subject! You keep going in circles and keep repeating stuff. As a result your vids are 2-3 times as long as what it should be and I'm sure you loose people as they give up and leave. You have good information. Please concentrate on your dialogue. Thanks again for the videos.
  15. What if I have a WD "My Passport"? What are my options?
  16. Thank you for the video. I just purchased an Anker HD docking station, waiting for it to arrive. Question I have for you, do I remove the SATA Bridge card prior to using the docking station? I have a Seagate Backup Plus HD 2TB.
  17. I only buy WD drives and use to get cheap external drives. I always take them out of the case and use them internally in my PC. The ones I bought all had Sata/USB cards not built onto the drive and I could take them off. The one thing I did notice with newer WD external drives is that somehow they made it so that any data written to the drive while it's in the case is encrypted. I made the mistake of wasting 4 hours transferring data to it only to find out the data can't be read by windows once you take the drive out of the case and put it into the PC. The image you showed of the triangular shaped connector is what all of the WD ones looked like that I bought.
  18. Great information, but lots of repeating.
  19. Going to try hope this will woooooooork
  20. So, how do you know if it's the SATA card that went bad?