I have a HDD 4tb Toshiba drive I had in a Raid 1 NAS device (NSA320) that failed in the raid and I replaced it and rebuilt the raid and life was good.
I have finally moved to a better custom TrueNas scale setup with 2x 8tb HDD in a Raid 1 with weekly encrypted backups to online cloud. I have 2 4tb Toshiba HDDs that match closely with the dead hdd.
I want to try to recover data from it mainly because I want the experience… Let me explain. The drive clicks, yes you can hear the disks spin up to speed and then you hear clicking as it’s trying to read.
I want to know if I can start off trying to swap the circuit board to rule that out without much issue? I have true HEPA filter air purifiers and I can rotate and angle them to have a positive pure air pressure if I need to open it up and swap out the arms.
Is it worth trying? Anything I should know or think about in my decision to try this?
It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.
I once had a hard drive of some particular vintage that wasn’t able to start. I did actually get it running with a hammer tap. Got the remains of data out and replaced the drive. It was nothing special, a Unix system drive with nothing that wasn’t on tape, but I just had to see if I could fix a hard drive with a hammer.
I also remember one admin who would often be seen walking between computer maintenance room and workshop wing with drives and a blacksmiths hammer labelled “format”.