Data Recovery Case File · Electrical Damage · HDD & SSD

One power event, three casualties: electrical triage on two hard drives and a Samsung SSD

The customer diagnosed his own accident with commendable precision: testing a power supply, he'd connected the 24-pin to a PSU tester with the rest of the system still attached — and everything downstream got power it was never meant to see. When the smoke cleared, figuratively, a 4TB WD Black, a 3TB Seagate Barracuda and a 1TB Samsung 860 EVO were all dead to the system.

The enquiry

“I have reason to believe I've fried the controllers on two hard drives and an SSD. I plugged my 24-pin into a PSU tester but left the rest of the components attached, so everything got powered when I didn't expect it. Other than the electronics — possibly from overvolting — the drives are physically unscathed. I'm particularly concerned about the WD.”

Same event, three different injuries

Electrical cases are triage cases: identical exposure, individual outcomes, because what dies depends on where each device's protection gave way. The two hard drives told the two classic versions of the story. The WD Black got the good one — its sacrificial protection had clamped the event and died doing it, leaving the drive completely dead and essentially unharmed; with the failed protection components dealt with at the bench and the rails verified sane under current-limited power, it spun up as if nothing had happened. The Seagate got the worse one: the fault had reached past the protection into the board proper, so its electronics were retired wholesale — a matching donor PCB fitted, with the original board's 8-pin ROM transferred across so the donor electronics carried this drive's unique calibration data rather than a stranger's.

Both drives were imaged in full on the TaskForce 2 the moment they ran — an electrically-traumatised drive is imaged first and trusted never — and both images completed clean end to end. His instinct about the platters was right: mechanically, nothing had happened at all.

The SSD, and the uncomfortable truth about SSDs

The 860 EVO was the case's teaching moment. On a hard drive, electronics are replaceable scaffolding around the platters where data physically lives. On a modern SSD the balance inverts: the controller isn't scaffolding, it's the librarian — it alone holds the logic that maps scattered, encoded flash pages into your files, and on Samsung's design the data on the NAND chips is encrypted by that controller as a matter of course. Reading the memory chips directly, the trump card of flash recovery, produces beautifully preserved ciphertext. If the controller can't be made to run, there is no side door. So SSD electrical work is conservative by necessity: diagnosis traced the damage to the drive's power-input stage — the components that condition incoming power before it reaches anything clever — which was repaired at component level until the controller received clean rails and, decisively, woke up. The SSD enumerated, and was imaged immediately and completely, because a once-injured controller gets exactly one obligation-free performance.

Outcome

Three drives, three full images, one relieved customer — and a case that ranked its own difficulty backwards from his expectations. He'd assumed the hard drives would be "easily recoverable" and worried accordingly about everything; in truth the HDDs were routine bench work, and the SSD was the one whose fate sat on a knife's edge it never knew about. Worth carrying forward: the fuller your SSD, the more it deserves a backup, because its failure modes are the least forgiving in the building.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.