Kaboom

I was asked to look at something for someone at the IT club. It's a 4 TB Western Digital My Book that doesn't work any more. I cracked the case open and someone had already been on the inside and the disk was disconnected from the controller board already.

I tested the hard disk with a SATA-USB adapter and was able to check the health of the disk and mount it on my Linux system even though it was formatted for Windows (NTFS).

I had a good look at the tiny USB-SATA board that was on the inside and after a few seconds of looking you can see this part U5 has clearly failed catastrophically, and I think there isn't any power getting through or at least no 5 volts - the input is 12 volts DC. A few years ago you could get spare boards for this, though at almost the same price as a whole new enclosure. Now the board isn't easily available any more.

Assuming no other part is faulty or damaged you could de-solder this part, and surface solder in a new one - but that's skill I don't have, and a new enclosure is a lot less risky to do... The data seems fine though, so it's just the inconvenience of it now.