What Should I do? An external enclosure killed my drive.

Redisle

Ok, So I just got this in the post from DX, I was very happy because I ordered on the 17th and it came today which is faster than normal for them. Anyway I set off straight away to put it to the test.
I had a 320gig WD Sata drive around which had some data backed up on it but it had no enclosure ( I had been using it with another enclosure, swapping between drives). So I fitted the drive to the enclosure, used the supplied sata power cable and sata data cable and used the supplied PSU.
Connected it up to laptop and switched it on. The drive span up okay but nothing registered on the laptop.
Switched it off and on again and this time the remove hardware icon appeared but the computer didnt go through any add new hardware sequence. Went into disk management and it was there as Disk 1 but unreadable..

I thought maybe the enclosure was faulty.. So I stuck the disk into my other enclosure and it didnt even spin up :0
I put it back into the new one and it didn't spin up..And I noticed the control circuitry under the drive started heating up quickly so I unlplugged it prompto..
The psu's are different for both enclosures but I made sure only to use its own psu with each..

Im afraid to try my other drive in the new enclosure as I don't want to lose that too..

So basically, my question. What recourse do I have? I just b ought a product from them and it is faulty and it killed my 320 gig drive (Im not too bothered about what was on it, more about having the actual drive available for backup).
I should email them and say what? Will they be liable to replace my dead drive?

biko

Some companies (but maybe not this) have a warranty that they will replace fried items if their hardware turns out to have caused a problem. Write the company and explain what happened.
They will (maybe) RMA it for inspection by their engineers.

Ian Beale

For them to replace or compensate you you'll have to prove it,days of honesty are gone they may think your trying to get a free hdd out of it and the one you have was already broken.

Send an e-mail and say your hdd got fried when you turned it on and its no longer reading the drive,see what they have to say and then at least you know if there going to be cooperative or not.

Run_to_da_hills

biko wrote: »

Some companies (but maybe not this) have a warranty that they will replace fried items if their hardware turns out to have caused a problem. Write the company and explain what happened.
They will (maybe) RMA it for inspection by their engineers.

Bring the caddy to a technician and get it checked out with a multi meter to see if the power output to the external drive to the SATA drive is greater than 12v it could possibly fry the drive.

I had problems with loosing data from using spurious external caddy’s but I never lost a hard drive. Another possibility could be static discharge, if you put the drive down on a carpet or bed or even touched the circutry before putting it into the caddy the static discharge could short out and fry the controller on the drive, this has also happened to me.

ronivek

It's highly unlikely that a drive enclosure would "fry" a HDD. Much more likely to be user error or an inherently faulty HDD to begin with.

What brand HDD is it? How old is it? You'll have much more luck with the manufacturer or seller of the HDD with respect to getting the HDD sorted.

jor el

I have the exact same caddy myself, bought on eBay though.

The fact that the drive circutry is heating up is a good indication that something serious went wrong. I've managed to fry a few drives over they years, mostly by getting the 12V and 5V supplies mixed up (though this only happens if you're splicing your own power cables and not using manufacturer supplied ones like you've done in this case).

To test if the caddy is working properly, disconnect any hard disk from inside it. Connect the power supply to it and switch it on. If there's an old-style Molex power connector, the one with 4 pins, Red (5V), 2 blacks (0V) and yellow (12V) then you can easily measure the voltage on these with a multimeter if you have one. Anything wrong with the 5V or 12V supplies will blow the drive up. It would also be easy for DX to verify this and this should be reasonable proof that the caddy did the damage so you _should_ be covered by DX for the cost.

The SATA power connector pinout can be seen here if you need to measure voltages on this. There's also a 3.3V supply in this.

Having said all that, the damage could have been caused in swapping it in and out of the other case. If the power supply on the caddy is all fine, then it would point at user error I'm afraid.

Redisle

Thanks for all the replies guys, it really helps.
What someone said there.. about static.. I hadn't thought of that. Normally when im handling components I use anti-static bags but this time I didn't bother and I actually did fit it into the enclosure on the bed

I don't really have time at the mo but I do have a multimeter so I will check the outputs when I get the chance. I guess at this stage then there is no point in trying to get compenstation for the drive since it may have been user error.. I still think the enclore may be faulty though so Im gonna try and RMA it. Even if they don't take it back it did only cost 29 dollars (which at the time was 19 euro)

I just remembered though that there is some data on there that Id rather not lose (its not actually my data, but stuff I backed up for someone previously when doing a reinstall). Im wondering if it would work if I swapped out the control board from my other WD drive?
The drive thats bust is a WD 320gb 16mb cache. My other one is WD 250gb 16mb.. Ive seen some youtube vid where someone got data off an 80gig using a board from a 40gig so Im gonna try it when I get the chance..

And I just realised how cheap hd's have got since I built my last pc so I havent lost that much after all ( I build about 2 years ago, amd skt 939 so thats when the drives were bought)

Thanks again for the replies guys.

jor el

Redisle wrote: »

Im wondering if it would work if I swapped out the control board from my other WD drive?
The drive thats bust is a WD 320gb 16mb cache. My other one is WD 250gb 16mb.. Ive seen some youtube vid where someone got data off an 80gig using a board from a 40gig so Im gonna try it when I get the chance..

That's been known to work when the boards are from the same model of drive, but if they're similar enough then a different model may well work. As long as there was no damage done to the drive motor or anything else it should do the trick. No harm in trying, especially given the price of these now is a pittance.