Alex. Here’s a tip when it comes to data recovery. Whenever you get the system to recognize the drive, immediately begin copying the files off it. The chances of the drive permanently failing are high and your goal should be to copy the files as soon as possible. It may only recognize the drive once or fail when it heats up. This is especially true for mechanical drives.

Who'd have thought a drive repair could have that much suspense?

Excellent fault finding. We didn't have thermal cameras 40 years ago - but we did have freezer spray. A quick freeze and then look for what melted 🙂 And no, I can't believe it was 40 years ago either (Apple iis) 🙄

Good video. You have 2 x AKJ regulators on board as per your microscope inspection. The parts (cap & inductor) are symmetric in the placement. You can compare between the non-blown side of the PCB layout. L502 = L501, C514 = C507, C517 = C511.

Good job Alex. A quick note though, a cap is not always connected to ground. Here's a few examples: DC blocking cap for amplification input, bootstrap capacitor, cap in MOSFET snubber network, etc...

That satisfaction when things get fixed must feel incredible. Excellent video.

As an electronic engineer with over 30 years of experience, I can tell you - this is a great job, buddy! A thermal camera is truly a magical tool!

Just wanted to say thank you. I lost 2 2TB drives back in like 2016 to an unknown failure (One wouldn't spin up, another would spin up, but wouldn't mount). I kept them around hemming and hawing at the idea of sending them in, but wasn't sure what to expect in terms of success rates or cost. Today, as I am packing to move, I brought them out again and took another look into recovery when I found this video. You said "sometimes visual inspection is enough to figure it out." So I did just that and found the contacts on the board for the head and motor were conspicuously corroded. I gave them a very light and careful scrub, and the drives came back up and I am currently moving the data to a RAID setup. You just saved me a boat load of money, and allowed me to get my data back. Thanks.

Hi Alex, you didn't realize that there are 2 exactly the same ICs there and the schematic around them is the same but just mirrored. the value of C507 capacitor should be the same as C520. Timing (18:27) you can see well both ICs and mirrored schematic around them.

There are 2 identical circuits right next to each other. Measure C514 to compare to C507.

Just found this channel this week and the reaction at the end when you saw that you recover the data was pure gold, you love what you're doing and it show !

Brilliant work, Alex...you persisted when others would have just old the customer, "Sorry, the drive is dead and a dud." I salute you!

That moment When you succeed at something is a moment of pure joy 21:51 is one of those moments where success is always measured by your patience

As always, its awesome to be along for the ride in searching for what the problem is and then seeing the big smile on Alex's face when its a fix, Brilliant job! :)

Nice freaking work, troubleshooting and diagnostics at its best right there. The feeling in your eyes and voice when you solved it was great.

Not only do I learn every time I watch, but I love your sense of humor. Thanks for the education and the laughs.

I thought that cap looked dodgy the first time you scanned over the board. It looked like it had got hot or had been replaced because there was something wet/shiny under it, you can see at 2:19 Great fix with the proper tools and methods. I would been shotgunning the board with components and hopefully got lucky.

The habits are sometimes misleading, depending on the devices the ground is not always on the screwdriver, I have the same habits. Thank you for sharing this information. Great job

Wow, great job. After the visual inspection if it wasn't for the thermal cam I wouldn't have guessed the problem would be at the opposite side of the board. Bravo.

Love your videos! Nice to see you recover files in the end. I'm sure that's not always the case. Good work!

That screw hole not being a ground is the plot twist lol

Good work man. Please consider making youtube playlists with names of cpu, hdd, ssd, usb....etc. This way people quickly use your videos as reference Good luck

That smile when it worked, its the same i have when fixing my electronics. Love your work, always learning something new. Thanks.

That cap immediately looked bad to me when you first shown the board, so glad you came back to it.

Awesome work again. Alex. It's always a pleasure watching your uploads on here.

I have the same problem, a 1Tb dead drive which had almost all my life, family life, documents of my studies, all in that drive, i can imagine how happy that guy was by recovering his data, if that was true, you are amazing man, thanks on behalf of him... You deserve the subscription

Very good job! Respect from a Portugal viewer! Im learning a lot with your videos! Keep on the good work! Experience and dedication is all! ;)

Excellent video, sir! - Was hitting a wall with a customer's Crucial MX500 1TB - Drive was not recognized and would heat up very similarly as your example - With no schematics available, I was about to give up and send him to DriveSavers. But after watching you hunt down your shorted cap (C72) - I replicated your tests and bingo! - I found that C118 (on the flip side of the board) was indeed shorted to ground! - I pulled the bad cap and the drive mounted! - THANK YOU!

Outstanding sir, nice video, nice sleuthing on a so-common failure. Three really good points here... Hot tweezers, thermal camera, and burned inductor due to the shorted cap. Chip next to inductor is likely a power rail buck controller mosfet switcher. (actually, the 2 chips left of that inductor, and the left one has its own inductor)

Awesome video!! I would appreciate seeing these types of hard drive repairs and troubleshooting. Would be nice to know the age of that drive. People can decide their own risks.

Great troubleshooting skills, a great sense of humor and you got results, nice work! I learned a few tricks from you, thank you Alex.

I would like to thank you because you gave me the right direction to follow. 🙏 I was able to detect 7 capacitors that was shorted to ground with my old multimeter. Of course there was only one that was dead but after desoldered, measured and resoldered them one by one , I found the giulty one : it was C503 for me. The SSD is now alive again and I retrieved all my data. 👍

Great job. I would have thought that screw hole was ground aswell but I'll keep an eye on that in future I've learned from that screw hole today

Great job as always, but just in defense of data recovery labs expenses, sometimes the work needs to be done on a firmware/translator level, or, as a last resort, a chip off recovery, which could take days. Both technics require expensive hardware/software solutions. Greetings from Brasil. ✌️

really respect you being upfront on your prices! Keep it up sir!

Wow! Had me on the edge of my seat! Even my dog Boo couldn't bare to watch! And for extra dramatic effect, your wife phones in the middle of it all. Love it!

As some already said, not all caps go to ground, same with inductors. Also, just have a SATA connector that you can plug in the drive to have access to ground, and even power it using your bench psu if necessary.

That was an awesome fix. I'm pretty sure the client was quite relieved.

Great job. That v2 microscope camera is so good that even with a defective laptop screen i could see that the screw hole was not connected to the ground plane.

You are indeed a very clever and courageous man - nice fault finding methodology !!

Great job! Im in IT Support but never saw a repair done like this. I'll be watching for more content.

Alex doesn’t matter how many of your videos I watch, you skill is unbelievable. Your experience is priceless.

what a clever customer that choosen to repair his device by you.good job and inspection was very usefull to learn for us

Excellent video, I'm an old man but still love messing with electronics, it's really a hobby for me. My kind of fun, I never stop learning, love it!

I just had a HUGE Fortune 50 electronics controls firm Engineer lab bring me a thumb drive for recovery. It was terribly smooshed. They started calling and speaking disrespectfully and dismissive, insinuating for some reason that they made a mistake bringing it to my shop because things were taking so long, I'm in over my head, etc. I reminded them that if the data on the drive were so important to them, they would have gone with the much more expensive out of state data recovery firm I tried to refer them to...they declined because apparently all they really have interest in is having someone that they can speak down to like this.. (I recently discovered that they HAD tried that firm and the job was a fail.) I warned them that a stressful call like this increases the odds of their thumb drive's recovery chances quickly dropping to 0% - as I need to not be stressed to do my best. I said "Stop shooting yourself in the foot." I told them that I normally charge $450 for this job. I got their data. Their bill was $750. They complained. I said I could always just give them their crap back, I don't want a customer like them, the extra $300 was absolutely punitive charge for them wasting my time and stressing me which prevented me from being in the right state of mind to do ANY work which cost me a minimum of $2,000. He laughed and expressed appreciation for my wizardry and paid and got his data. I told him I enjoyed doing business with him. I had to shave and drill and xray that NAND and had to fly line tie to points inside the NAND and repair traces in different layers. NO coffee! I won't do that work for under $2,500 now. It's THAT stupid. If I don't take a job like that I can earn over $1,500 per day and have NO stress and enjoy my coffee. Such a job can eat up time. At my age I had to wait until I was "in the zone". There's a REASON this work costs.

This is specifically why I always tell people to NOT buy UDP flash drives, if they fail you have to sand the chip down and micro solder wires onto an unspecified location. With NAND flash drives you can move the chips and read them directly.

You saved his life,what a great surgeon!!!👏👏👏

Amazing skills!! i do hvac repairs and i know the feeling when you fix a challenging problem.

Always good to see a win. Awesome job taking care of the customer on this one. The easy way out would have been to deem it a no fix and take the quick cash. Hanging in there a little longer paid off. Well done 💯

Now that's just awesome, for some reason I haven't thought of repairing an SSD and that opens a whole lot of new possibilities xP

I like how you worked. This is old school in electronics. Because the ssd is still working, I recommend putting the two decoupling capacitors next to the memory. With love from Romania!

I "accidentally"watched it all the way to the end 👍 Love you story telling for the stuff i know little to nothing about, but it is very interesting! Subscribed.

Amazing picture quality on the V2 scope!

Glad they were able to get their data back. It's a shame though, those crucial mx500 SSDs have exceptional performance for their price.

You have me addicted to all of your Videos, I am also a Tech at a different level that you are. I only repair PCs and Laptops on a much more simpler level. I am an old School Electronic repair Tech, such as old Reel to Reels and Amps. You have the awesome Talent of repairing stuff down to the SMD Levels.

Wow, great job! Those thermal cameras are a lifesaver these days!

It is surprising how small the boards in an SSD can be really. They only have that case to give them a standard form factor and it keeps the price down from not having to make a lot of custom size cases.

It was slightly barbaric, but author done exactly what customer was asked for. Even if datasheet for DC converter is not available, this PCB has similar DC converter next to damaged one, so it was a clue to normal repair. Also, acceding data without decoupling capacitor is too risky for data integrity.

I'm sold on getting a thermal camera! Thanks, I really learn alot from your videos.

It's always a bad capacitor, always! Glad you got the data back, I hope you gave your customer a nice lecture about the importance of backups!

⚠️ Warning: The smile is contagious 😊

Hi, I am not an electronics repair guy but I always love to see you repair stuff. Is it possible if you could also tell why a particular failure took place?

I really do like your approach. Not knowing if it's fixable is nice and more like a real life situation.

You have such a passion for your job. I would trust nobody else to fix stuff for me. We can all see you really want to find a fix, you are not just there to take money, like my car mechanic 🤬

Always make backup of important files. Everybody can buy huge amount of cloud storage for a few dollars from Microsoft, Apple or Google. If not you can buy a spare drive and save every important data on that drive too. It's may looks expensive but it's cheaper than the lost data or the recovery process(if possible). At our company the last IT guy did not make backups so often and when a data loss happened we went to an service shop and they told us the controller was dead. A data recovery center was able to save important data but that was expensive.

Fascinating video! Not sure how I got here but I am glad I did!! Sparked a new curiosity in electronics!

Very impressive work, thank you for sharing it!! Another happy customer at the end of the day, at least until the invoice comes, LOL! Great job!!

The problem IC U500 seems to be a mirror of U508 so maybe you can verify based on that, unless theres also a problem with U508 then it wont be a reliable method

This was a master class in forensic electronics troubleshooting.👍

Nice Job, Alex. I like the use of the thermal camera to find a short.

Good job, thermal camera is shaping up to be an essential tool.....right up there with the microscope.....again, great job!!

If it's for recovery only, couldn't you just measure the voltages on the other dc-dc converters, then remove inductor and capacitor from one of the others and move them to replace the bad ones, and inject the known (previously measured) voltage where you desoldered the parts from?

At least with an SSD they are cheap enough that you can buy an identical one to help in troubleshooting or to act as a donor board. That is if the trapped data is important enough to justify the expense.

20 yrs ago, there was no thermal thing if there was i wasn't aware. The PC came to me with blank monitor eventhough pc was running. My luck, i sense the heat on the video card and i knew what the problem was. Being cheap the video card, we replaced it with a better quality, the happy face of the customer was priceless, his wife wanted to toss the entire PC. Great video kudos to these techs

I am very impressed by this author! I watched him do similar repairs on two failures. He i very entertaining as well. I have had the same experience watching talented mechanics repairing cars. All of his experience makes this look easy but I am sure all of his experience makes repairs look easy but what you do not see is the 100s of repairs and failures he has done to build the necessary skills.

At 4:55 you said you don't know the value of the capacitor. Even though it's not a guarantee, it looks like there is an identical circuit to the left. I.e. L502, C514 etc. which you probably could've measured to get the values.

Not all capacitors connect to ground some of them connect to the chip itself with another negative and positive source which has no connection to common ground

Don't know why watching videos like these are so cool. Maybe because I also like fixing things instead of just throwing it away. Would love to have this kind of knowledge. Anyway... like your channel and your videos. Found your channel couple of days ago.

It really worked for me after I look and try some tutorials, yours is the one that worked. Owe you a lot.

This is some noble work ❤. Assuming that the data itself is not questionable 😂

I bet your client is happy. Grats... Great Video, TYVM

Dude your are good!!! Your intuition and persistence (plus good tools!!!) wins the day again!!! Well done Sir!!!!

Thanks for the great instruction, I'm watching to learn how to repair modern electronics. My first project is repairing a Wacom 22 inch display, I hope.

This guy clearly share knowledge actual repair and troubleshooting. love to watch helpful Videos like this

Thanks for the tutorial, it's much faster than any other method I came across.

Brilliant piece of diagnostics, great help using the thermal camera, i enjoyed this. Thanks.

I believe i had just as much excitement as Alex when I heard the tone and even smiled. That is why we do this folks, its not always about the money, but that feeling you get when you get something to work again. I really need to get me a thermal camera so I can inspect a bad drive in which I have about 500 movies on and also my Discro's of music collected over the years.

the moment you did it and have a satisfying smile.! outstanding job there!

Just happen to come across your channel. So far, after watching a few vid's, am enjoying your content. Will help me tremendously, I have subscribed. Thank You

Another good job. It was looking like you were going to throw the towel in for a minute.

23 minutes, I'm on the edge of my seat! 😬 Great job, Alex - I envy you!

Hey Came across this diagnostic work and automatically subscribed. Excellent work.

Heeey, Alex, am sooo amused at how you got around this board. Cheers all the way from Nyeri in central Kenya. I need really have to be around such people like you. I never knew about thermal cameras. Wao!!!

I love your channel. I only understand half of it because I'm from Germany but it always fascinates me how you fix things.

I can only say that it makes me tremendously envious to see how these types of devices are fixed.

Your persistence paid off. Well done sir.

Great video! The next best thing to a thermal camera is a can of freeze spray and eyes. I found another rogue cap and transistor in an audio amplifier giving me grief a few years back. Would’ve taken ages to find otherwise. Same amp right now blasting out Bitches Brew by the late great Miles Davis. Have a great week.

Good job… I love your smile when you find the problem and fix the issue.. victory is golden!

More important than the fix - you made me smile. I won't say I have never seen such a hit and miss fingers crossed approach before as it would be rude. Good on yer.

I enjoyed that thanks for sharing, was surprised the drive worked with out replacing the broken resistor