Would you re-use a hard drive from a possibly faulty enclosure?

[mikeymikec]

A customer had an older mains-powered Seagate external hard drive. One day, they plugged it into their Dell desktop PC and received a message about a USB power surge, then the next time they tried to switch said computer on, it wouldn't.

The diagnostic lights suggested a board problem, and I tried swapping out with spares everything I could (PSU, RAM, etc, though I don't have a spare identical Dell board), but the PC wouldn't start any more. I suspect that because either because the power surge hit the southbridge or that the power switch and USB are seemingly controlled by the same separate board (which then hooks in via a proprietary connector to the main board), that perhaps either or both essentially bricked the (approx) ten year old PC.

My feeling was that if this enclosure + power adapter caused a power surge that could have fried a PC, the last thing I want to do is plug it into another one unless I consider the PC in question to be expendable. I don't have such a PC, so I haven't risked doing that. After following my line of reasoning, the customer didn't want the drive/enclosure any more.

I opened up the enclosure and both the enclosure's circuit board and the drive's look fine to me. I'm wondering whether I should risk connecting the hard disk up to my own dock to see whether it still works. Thoughts?

 

[Murloc]

how much is the hard disk worth?

 

[mikeymikec]

There's no data on it that anyone cares about. It's a 3.5" 500GB 7200.12, which puts it around 5 years old I think.

 

[silicon]

A customer had an older mains-powered Seagate external hard drive. One day, they plugged it into their Dell desktop PC and received a message about a USB power surge, then the next time they tried to switch said computer on, it wouldn't.

The diagnostic lights suggested a board problem, and I tried swapping out with spares everything I could (PSU, RAM, etc, though I don't have a spare identical Dell board), but the PC wouldn't start any more. I suspect that because either because the power surge hit the southbridge or that the power switch and USB are seemingly controlled by the same separate board (which then hooks in via a proprietary connector to the main board), that perhaps either or both essentially bricked the (approx) ten year old PC.

My feeling was that if this enclosure + power adapter caused a power surge that could have fried a PC, the last thing I want to do is plug it into another one unless I consider the PC in question to be expendable. I don't have such a PC, so I haven't risked doing that. After following my line of reasoning, the customer didn't want the drive/enclosure any more.

I opened up the enclosure and both the enclosure's circuit board and the drive's look fine to me. I'm wondering whether I should risk connecting the hard disk up to my own dock to see whether it still works. Thoughts?

Remove the drive from the enclosure and scrap it. The bare drive now should be ok to plug in to another old and expendable computer but don't do just yet. Take a known USB connector and try that instead with a know power source. i suspect that the old enclosure had a fault that allowed a high voltage to the USB connector. Or you may decide that its all not worth it and just junk the drive.

 

[corkyg]

If the drive is removed completely from the external enclosure, it can be tested with a universal external enclosure via USB. Remember that a 3.5in HDD must have a separate power source. They will not eun on USB alone. Assume it is a SATA HDD?

 

[mikeymikec]

Yep, SATA HDD.