how can I get data off this drive?

July 16, 2009 9:05 AM

I am trying to recover data from a WD3200ME-01, a WD 320GB USB-powered drive but the physical drive does not have SATA or IDE connection - only a mini USB connection soldered to the circuit board - and the drive is not recognized via USB anymore.

Images of the extracted drive are here (I apologize for the medium quality of the photos). Normally we take the drive out, hook it to a machine on our bench and run data recovery software if the drive is capable. This is the first one of these I've found like this so far. The USB connection is part of the the circuit board itself, which extends well past the normal dimensions of a drive like this, and the SATA connectors are modified. It does NOT work like this, which is how I expected it to.

Has anyone been able to make this drive do SATA like it should (the drive label states that it is Serial ATA) or find another way to access these drives?

posted by dozo to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Your pic isn't showing up.

I think this is going to be hard. It sounds like there is likely a SATA to USB transcoder chip in there somewhere. Luckily, SATA only has a few signal pins, so if you can find that part you may be able to solder directly to the SATA pins (you'd probably remove the transcoder chip entirely). It will be pretty destructive, but in principle it can work.

Try using a scanner to capture as clear and high resolution an image of the PCB as possible, and we can start looking up part numbers at places like alldatasheet.com.

Anyway, that's all I can think of, but maybe somebody has run into one of these and has other ideas.
posted by Chuckles at 9:16 AM on July 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

Did a Google image search for the driver model in question. I found this thread. For the model pictured... it seems to indicate that a SATA to USB bridge is being used. Is this no longer the case with the drive you have, dozo?
posted by PROD_TPSL at 9:57 AM on July 16

Just viewed the video, dozo. If WD completely redesigned the controller PCB for this "product" to differentiate it and prevent its use as a standard SATA disk... someone at WD needs to be fucking curb checked.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 10:07 AM on July 16

I think your last-ditch option would be to find an equivalent drive with a SATA connector and swap the circuit boards.
posted by zsazsa at 11:38 AM on July 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

Seconding, zsaszsa. I've performed logic boards swaps for various IDE disks over the years. I've not had any "opportunities" present themselves with an SATA disk... yet.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 2:29 PM on July 16

aww, crap. Here are the photos.

I found that one, too, PROD_TPSL, but it was for a slightly different disk. The actual drive in the case is a WD3200BMVU and the power and data are obviously routed through the usb interface. You can see in photo2 that the pcb is now one with the usb, whereas they used to be easily removable.

I like the idea Chuckles, but probably not feasible. The people it belongs to are more likely to send it off for hardcore dismantling and recovery. Switching the pcb probably falls under this as well.

Thanks for the suggestions, and everyone should be aware of this when they purchase externals now. Recovery just got a lot harder on certain models.
posted by dozo at 3:40 PM on July 16

Can you post a pic of the connector end? There is a bit of plastic that looks interesting. Also, all those jumpers.. Any identifying letters or anything around those? It looks like there is a chance that the SATA port is exposed somewhere there...

Does the drive spin up? I mean, might not be the best thing to test just to answer me (possible damage, etc. etc.), but if you already know...
posted by Chuckles at 4:50 PM on July 16

will do tomorrow - it is back at the office. thanks.
posted by dozo at 7:32 PM on July 16

crap, forgot about this question until the followup mefimail.

The owners of the drive picked it up for sending to a specialized data recovery company the day I would have posted back. I never resolved it, which is a bummer.
posted by dozo at 12:14 PM on August 15