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

[SennaSempre]

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 -

How to Shuck a WD Elements External Hard Drive

Shucking an external hard drive involves disassembling the external enclosure and harvesting the bare hard drive inside. From there, you can use...

www.ifixit.com

...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

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II review: Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II

www.cnet.com

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6TB Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II Review (WDH2Q60000)

In March, Western Digital announced an extension to their My Book Studio Edition II dual-drive storage…

www.storagereview.com

 

[SennaSempre]

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 casing 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 drives?

 

[ojfd]

Is your WD MyBook Studio II dead now? Or is it just one drive? It's not clear from your posts.

 

[SennaSempre]

Well the drive doesn't spin up since its RAID 0 configuration both drives won't correspond. It's an old 2011 version which I believe is before their 256 AES encryption and MyCloud and all the key problems that MyBook Duo owners have in the later models. I also don't use WD proprietary disk management software. I just plug it into an OSX and that's all. So it should be easier to work with in that way, yet harder to work with since its in RAID 0 configuration.

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. 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 drive 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.

 

[ojfd]

First, you have to check if your drives are still OK. Download the DriveDx app and test both drives separately using USB to SATA or whatever adapter you have to see what the SMART reports say. DriveDx has a fully functional demo.

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health diagnostics and monitoring utility

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health (S.M.A.R.T.) diagnostics and monitoring utility. Save yourself the data loss and downtime that is associated with unexpected SSD and HDD failures. Don't worry about losing your important data, music, and photographs.

binaryfruit.com

 

[SennaSempre]

I'm waiting on some adapters in the mail and I'm also looking into DMDE along with DriveDX, they seem better than an EaseUS or maybe Disk Drill.

 

[SennaSempre]

From what I have been reading DriveDx looks like a preventative measure and not a program like DMDE that can recoup data after it has been lost, am I correct in that assumption?

 

[Fishrrman]

Re reply 7:
Yes.

 

[SennaSempre]

then DriveDx is useless because its after the fact, the damage is already done NAFO.