Good evening,
The short answer is "try it and see", or if the data is important,
"spend the money to take it to the pros".
The longer answer is that there is no identical controller board. The
board on the very next drive off the assembly line after yours is
subtly different. Basically, when the platters inside the hard drive
are made, there are defects. Because there will always be defects in
a device intended to store trillions of bits (or in your drive's case,
about half a trillion), there has to be some way to detect them and
work around it. The manufacturing defects are permanent and don't
spread, so finding them and not using the parts of the platter that
have defects is a reasonable strategy. After the platters are made,
they are put into drives and tested. When a given part of the disk
continually gives errors, the drive's firmware knows it's bad. What
then happens is that the sector is "remapped" to some place on the
drive that is fine.
Old hard drives were addressed using CHS information (Cylinders,
heads, sectors). This is quite old, but referred to actual physical
locations on the hard drive. Newer hard drives use LBA (logical block
addressing), in which the LBA number has no particular relation to the
physical location on the drive where data is stored. When the
location that a given LBA address would point to is bad, the drive's
firmware makes a note that it should use a different sector instead.
The end result is that you buy a hard drive that is "perfect" and
works reliably, even though the platters are littered with errors.
What this means is that if you put a different controller on your old
drive, it will not know which sectors of yours are bad, and more
importantly will think some perfectly good sectors are bad. The end
result will be that you will get read errors for all the bad sectors
on your drive, and will get scrambled data in all the files where the
controller *thinks* there are bad sectors. That said, if "most" of
your data is good enough, this is a fairly simple way to resurrect
drives, if it works.Good evening,
The short answer is "try it and see", or if the data is important,
"spend the money to take it to the pros".
The longer answer is that there is no identical controller board. The
board on the very next drive off the assembly line after yours is
subtly different. Basically, when the platters inside the hard drive
are made, there are defects. Because there will always be defects in
a device intended to store trillions of bits (or in your drive's case,
about half a trillion), there has to be some way to detect them and
work around it. The manufacturing defects are permanent and don't
spread, so finding them and not using the parts of the platter that
have defects is a reasonable strategy. After the platters are made,
they are put into drives and tested. When a given part of the disk
continually gives errors, the drive's firmware knows it's bad. What
then happens is that the sector is "remapped" to some place on the
drive that is fine.
Old hard drives were addressed using CHS information (Cylinders,
heads, sectors). This is quite old, but referred to actual physical
locations on the hard drive. Newer hard drives use LBA (logical block
addressing), in which the LBA number has no particular relation to the
physical location on the drive where data is stored. When the
location that a given LBA address would point to is bad, the drive's
firmware makes a note that it should use a different sector instead.
The end result is that you buy a hard drive that is "perfect" and
works reliably, even though the platters are littered with errors.
What this means is that if you put a different controller on your old
drive, it will not know which sectors of yours are bad, and more
importantly will think some perfectly good sectors are bad. The end
result will be that you will get read errors for all the bad sectors
on your drive, and will get scrambled data in all the files where the
controller *thinks* there are bad sectors. That said, if "most" of
your data is good enough, this is a fairly simple way to resurrect
drives, if it works.
If your data is valuable, your best bet is to send the drive to one of
the data recovery companies, where they will remove the platters and
place them in special machines to read them. For drives with
(hopefully) no physical damage to the platters, the success rate is
extremely high.
Best of luck getting your data back!
-Haversian |
