This week we had a non-typical 128GB USB flash drive. At first glance the case looks like a standard broken connector repair. Typically you remove the bent or broken connector and replace it with a new USB 3.0 connector. WAIT! Not so fast. Look closer, this Phison based 128GB USB device has a non-standard USB pinout on the PCB side for the USB connector. Some quick tests with the multimeter and we can rewire the new connector and… Bam! Full recovery 🙂
Now let’s look at a hard drive case. What’s this? 4000.7MB Western Digital Caviar model AC34000-00LA. Yes, you are reading that correctly, it’s 4GB and it’s distributed across 3 platters. It’s not a good idea to be running your business on a 20 year old hard drive with no backup, but we saved the day this time.
Not every failed hard drive is recoverable so lets go check our backups, who is with me? What? You don’t have a backup? Now is a good time to get one, what are you waiting for? A 1TB portable hard drive is only about $45 and many of them include backup software. This is probably the best nickel’s worth of free advice you’ll ever get 🙂