1492 wrote:
Another factor in modern hard drives is that the drive's PCB board may contain flashed HD calibration data, specific to that drive when assembled. So replacing the PCB with an identical model does not work in most cases.
I must be awfully damn lucky then. I've recovered data on over a dozen hard drives in the past 10 years by swapping electronics. All of them have been the 3.5" drives, I've never had to do a 2.5" drive. I keep old hard drives just for this reason.
Could you imagine the manufacturing process that would go into testing every single drive and flashing a new calibration on each one of them? I call BS on that based on my own experience.
And, as long as the firmware is the same or newer, it works.
When people recommend things like swapping the electronics and freezing, it is typically to those who don't think their data is worth $500-1000 to recover through one of the services. It basically comes down to last ditch effort to see if it is possible. When it gets to that point, anything you try *might* recover the data, and most likely will make it harder for other methods if that fails.
The Chip that was different on that video... it was simply a memory chip. Samsung switched from using ESMT memory to Samsung memory. Everything else on the board is the same.
