Water-Damaged WD MyBook Studio Edition II Quad Interface 6TB

Hello, this is my 1st post and the reason why I joined. I have a water-damaged hard drive 6TB that had water on-or-in it for 1 day and then I dried it out. I see no water corrosion damage anywhere on the drive itself or the internal control board in the chassis or housing.

This hard drive would not power up when plugged into a 15" MacBook Pro but it did when plug into a 27" iMac using the same stock AC adapter. The power status with the 27" iMac has the front light blinking but no spinning of the platters.

I read that it could be a problem with the control board in the housing unit and to use a SATA-USB connector straight into the computer which I've done to no avail. I've tried this 3.3V pin tape-hack explained in Step 14 here -

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Shuck+a+WD+Elements+External+Hard+Drive/137646

...and still nothing on both drives. I don't know what else I can do which is why I'm asking you. Some extra links to the exact model I have with the online manual and attached photos. Any advice is greatly appreciated, thank you.

Online Manual - https://www.manua.ls/western-digital/my-book-studio-ii/manual

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/western-digital-my-book-studio-edition-2-review/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/4759/western-digital-my-book-studio-edition-ii-6tb-review

https://www.storagereview.com/review/6tb-western-digital-my-book-studio-edition-ii-review-wdh2q60000

 

thanks Tony, some good insight there, yeah the SATA cable works fine, when you say "rotational jerk" do you mean like a flat spin like a frisbee or flipping it over like flipping pancakes?

on your #3 I don't know if it was a RAID setup but I'm guessing it was because the drive said 6 TB when it showed disk info when it was working, so does that mean they were stitched up?

and if "Both drives need to be functional to stitch the data back together." then how can "either drive can fail but you'll still have your data." if one of them fails, then they can't co-mingle with each other to work, would that be right?

 

oh man another variable (RAID 0) that could make this go bad even quicker. okay thanks for your advice, I'll try the simple stiction hack but with my luck I'm not that confident.

 

Upon closer inspection I see that one of these PCB's has a darker discoloration on some of the metal mounting points on the PCB. I took side-by-side pics of them here.

So I'm guessing that one of these boards had the water affect it more than the other and maybe has shorted out causing this darker burn-looking discoloration, I don't know, just speculating.

But since this is RAID 0 then I would have to replace this 1 board and reinstall it back into the original chassis and hope it starts up because I won't be able to get the to spin individually because of the RAID 0 configuration.

But I may need to replace the BIOS chip if the firmware is different. I don't know if it is just a clamp or if that chip is soldered because then I would have to bring the old and new PCB to a shop just to do that. Am I correct in any of this perhaps?

 

So I have taken the PCB off the drive casing and the other side looks good besides in 1 spot which I have circled. Not sure what those metal contacts are for?, but they are the only area that looks darkened or burnt or corroded besides the screw mounts.

The other dark areas you may see in the pic aren't actually there its only the shadow from a desk lamp to my top right. When I hit it with my flashlight they aren't there. Nothing is wet, but I'm thinking of soft cleaning the darkened metal areas with a new toothbrush and 90% isopropyl alcohol if that may do something. Or maybe the whole board as a 2nd attempt if it doesn't work.

 

hello, I don't know what "3 ICs" are? could you circle them on that jpeg I sent earlier? I would appreciate it, thank you

 

If I bought a SATA Hot-Swap Docking Station (if they come set up for RAID 0 drives, I don't know?) would the drives sync up and work or would they not because the RAID configuration may be stored in the PCB of the old housing - the WD MyBook Studio Edition II housing that it came with?

Also if I bought a new-used My Book Studio Edition II only to use the housing and pull out the new drives and replace them with my old drives...

I was told that I don’t want to install them into another My Book Studio Edition II chassis only for the new housing PCB to detect that there was a change of drives and that new housing PCB will “helpfully” wipe the partition information so I can use them as empties, loosing all of my data.

Would either or both of these 2 statements be true? Anyone have any experience with these particular RAID 0 setup WD Green Caviar drives?

 

After reading alot of stuff and watching lots of YouTube videos these past few days, I'm thinking that this is a burnt out voltage diode on the either the PCB attached to the external drive casing or the PCB in the housing enclosure itself or both because this was a water-damaged short somewhere on the logic board. My 2 possible approaches here are...

1) buy another exact sister model; housing, drives the whole package, and swap the BIOS ROM chips from the old PCB's on the drive casings to the new drives' PCB's and mount those new boards onto the old recovery drives. BUT will that work or do I have to do the same swap with the RAID Controller chip on the PCB in the housing enclosure from the old PCB to the new PCB as well?

2) or still do as I explained above but use an aftermarket dual SATA RAID docking station. BUT will that work or do I have to have the WD RAID Controller from the PCB in the housing enclosure for the 2 drives (was set up as RAID 0 by default) to co-mingle with each other to access the data? If it doesn't work then I am forced to do the 1st scenario just to use the WD housing and it's PCB.

 

I don't have a spare $1 or $2 or $3k large to drop on a professional data recovery shop, I don't have that kind of money. So if I can troubleshoot it myself and figure it out maybe I can either fix it myself or pars out parts to regular computer shop to do a simple BIOS chip swap and that could possibly fix it. I won't know that unless I try it.

The last thing that I would want to do is send off both drives to a specialist data shop whereby all they do is the same exact thing as said above, just changing a PCB board yet telling me that they need to do an arm-head replacement and charge me $2 grand for it while they won't even do that task anyways.

I'm sure there has been many situations like that; a shop lying to its customer saying they need to do all this extra work just to run up the bill like an auto mechanic or carpenter would. It's a business after all, I can't be naive about their possible honesty or not.

Therefore I have to expend all possible scenarios myself with the PCB's and a small local repair shop before even considering to drop the many thou for what I would know at that point would definitely be needed once all the PCB possibilities have been tried and checked off the list.

I hope that makes tremendous sense? Who wants to pay a pro data recovery shop $3,000 to just replace a BIOS chip on a PCB right.

 

I have been watching YouTube videos comparing the DD Command and DMDE since its a good way to get a visual on their completed steps before I start and come to those steps.

Both approaches seem quite easy to do even for a novice like myself but the DMDE GUI does make things more simplified and explanatory. It's actually quite a powerful program.

Right now I'm testing out these 2 approaches using smaller, mostly empty other SSD's before I start my real recovery. I'm using 2 SSD 480 GB for this bench test.

I also have re-purchased the exact same model WD MyBook Studio II but with 4 TB in size (mine is 6 TB) and that is still in RAID 0 by default. (Could be used for PCB swap and BIOS ROM soldering swap if I need to)

Testing SSD source drive holds only an OSX op system at 18 GB and no other personal files. SSD destination drive is empty, and the write speed is 1% per minute so it's going to take 1 hr and 30 min to complete.

When creating a disk image or cloning it, both DD Command and DMDE wants to use the whole destination disk space. (Side Note: my recovery 6 TB RAID 0 drives have 3 to 4 TB of used data on them)

My question is: the full 3 TB Disk 1 recovery drive will be cloned to the new 4 TB Raid 0 enclosure. Then how will I be able to clone the 2nd 3 TB Disk 2 recovery drive without overwriting the first 3 TB Disk 1 recovery drive as the disk image/clone method wants to use the whole destination disk?

And if I split the new WD MyBook into 2 partitions (to not overwrite the 2nd disk image over the 1st one) then how would I be able to link up those 2 partitions in RAID 0 if it's no longer 1 drive and now 2 separate drives?

Update: I just completed a test run on the 2 SSD 500 GB's and it took 2 full hours to copy sectors to the destination drive which shows nothing copied, no change in disk info or in disk utility, how can that be?