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.
Agree it happened to me I wanted to show off and took my personal drive to my friends home to show him that I managed to recover my hard drive without any repairs knowledge and than it never get to work and I still have that drive with me for 8 years so that one day I may be able to recover my data from it
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.
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) 🙄
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!
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...
Alex knows that for sure. but he assumed with his experience that board like this and in that particular area one leg of the caps should be connected to ground.
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.
I was yelling at the screen saying the same. Duplicate components in the same layout right next to the one with the issue. I'm not even a repair person.
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 !
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.
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. 👍
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.
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
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
What drive? I have over 100 drives I might have a extra PCB for it, that is if you can try if you swap bios by solder, let me know the make and model and I’ll look
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.
That could just be flux from the factory, very easy to overlook. Usually I only pay attention to flux that looks like it was burned (with no obvious signs of human rework) since that's more of a tell that something overheated or failed.
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.
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! :)
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. ✌️
what matters most is getting the data most efficiently so this method is best for the first try and I like your method if the first method doesn't work because reballing a NAND and then mounting it on a new board brings an added level of risk of damaging the chip and in repair you always have to calculate risk.
Yah, but here's the problem with that: data recovery labs (most of them) don't have tiers. They have a set fee and it's insanely high for all the reasons you mentioned. However, having worked in a data recovery lab, MAYBE 5% of the drives, tapes, cartridges, and cards that came in required the actual clean rooms and adaptive hardware resources to retrieve the data. When it comes to controlled storage, it is over 50% a component issue and the data chip(s) are fine. Otherwise if the chip itself is damaged you're done anyway and you can give the customer the option to pass it off to a chip restoration specialist if it is that important to them. That gets into the many thousands if not 10s of thousands with no guarantees either. So, something that took 30 minutes and succeeded still got charged $1499.95 where something that took a week and failed got charged the same. Now that was dealing with 2001 technologies. We still have the same basic tech now, but better, smaller, and 1000x more dense. The electronics are still all the same tho :)
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
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.
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.
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.
@@shorty808100 Actually 1TB drive nowadays doesnt have bigger boards, this is why M.2 drive is small - NAND Chips is very high capacity now. Those 2.5 drives is 2/3-3/4 empty now. Strange why they still dont make them in smaller cases (with possible rail extenders to fit 2.5 mounting holes).
Nice fix. Always great feeling when you found the problem, fix it and it works then... Don't know if this has been answered before. So you were removing two things in the end and not replacing them with working parts. It still worked. So my question is: what is the purpose of these two components in the first place if you don't need them to use the drive? Thanks for answering
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.
Except, people usually buy them for a reason, their ultra small size, and not necessarily the only copy of valuable data. It would be dumb to put the only copy of valuable data on any single drive. More concerning to power users that aren't just pulling audio files off, is they tend to have much worse write performance, especially if the design is prone to overheating, for example several Sandisk models yet they have no concern about fixing that, which is mind boggling.
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.
I also happy to see you get a success in your job like this 21:55. Like you ever said usual " Sometimes you win sometimes you lose we did everything that we could ". And this moment you win your job, I love that.
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)
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.
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.
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?
lol he thinks he his better then everyone ells he said in the last video that other repair people should stop trying to fix GPPU pins because they lack experience
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 💯
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?
Low quality components (you can check videos on youtube about exploding power supply units), bad circuitry, voltage surge, bad power supply, overheating, badly soldered pins on the board...i am not repairing micro components also, but i have degree in electronics and computer science, so i am just saying from experience what i witnessed and from what i learn.
Capacitor failure! He already said what the problem was when he removed the ceramic capacitor. Usually the problem with ceramic capacitors is that they short inside because the metal layers melt creating a metal wire inside.
My thermal camera cost me over $8K. Way before that, we would spray the board with freeze mist, which was nothing more than R12 Freon, we now call that liquid gold! The board would immediately frost up. When we applied current as you did, the trace would thaw out instantly. Most of the older boards were not multi layer. Another method, I have a probe set from HP, one is a current pulser probe and the other is a current probe. By pulsing parts of the circuit with very narrow high current pulses, we were able to move the current tracer around the board and find the nodes. Sometimes we knew what the common failures were and just pull the chip, cheaper than trouble shooting the board. We didn't have the tantalum capacitor failures back then that we have today. Thanks for sharing the video. BTW, before we had thermal cameras, I would use a non-contact IR thermometer and scan over different parts of the board, not very accurate. I've also burned my fingers touching things on the board that got very hot :( Jim
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.
Keep in mind that cloud storage is not suitable for all data. As rare as that might be it's unlikely this drive holds such data but the nature of it was unspecified. Either way worth a thought though you would be correct in most all aspects.
Dont ever do cloud back of important and personal files. You have no idea were the files are physically located. No. You do backup on your personal NAS or USB drives.
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!
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
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.
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 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.
I have been repairing lot of electronics and in my experience it's the capacitor, resistors , and transistors that usually fails. 90% of time semiconductor chips won't fail frequently.
I had this exact drive 'fail' years ago. The solution was to power it up with no data connection and leave it for several hours and it recovered. Planned to take it out of the laptop and plug it into a SATA power connector in my desktop PC, but it actually worked by just leaving the laptop at the BIOS screen overnight. After that it worked fine again and is still in use as a second drive. Worth trying before taking it apart.
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.
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.
man i dont know what it is about fixing things, but for me, its hands down one of the best feelings in life. free climbers got their cliffs, we got being Lazarus to whatever it is were fixing. when the drive went do-do-do-lew when you disconnected it. that look on your face is the epitome of that feeling. i got catharsis from it even. fist pump moment
This was my line of work when I went self employed though not on computers and peripherals. I decided and retired end of 2019. Didn't have a thermal camera which is a necessity in my opinion. Thank you for this video I enjoyed watching your work and perseverance 👍 Hope your wife doesn't watch this video 🤣😂 🇲🇹
Good detective work. Surface mount components are all black boxes for me but obviously you've had much more experience with such beasts. I had an SSD fail on me recently but couldn't open it, as it was still under warranty. Took it back for fix/replacement just yesterday, my data is probably lost.
Love your videos. Here is my experience with the X6. I bought the X6 4TB which cost me $569 CAD!!!! First time buyer of Crucial product. The one I received clocked about 35MB/s, more than 25 times slower than advertised. So ok, I have a defective unit. I contacted Crucial and after a bit they agreed to send me a new one. Except, when it arrived, I had to pay for duties because they put the full value on the invoice, which cost me another $90. This was not what I experienced with returns from other companies over the years, where it is usually indicated that this is a replacement for a defective unit. So I called the company and was told it is "company policy". So ok, another $90n bucks gone, but at least I have a new working unit; WRONG!!!! The new unit was the same as the old one. So after almost $700, I am stuck with something that belongs in the garbage. Nice work, Crucial. I have tried on several computers, Lenovo(i7, 7th generation) win10, Surface Pro 6 with i7 win10, and another win7 desktop. So I downloaded the firmware thinking it could fix it. Both the online version and the iso version couldn't even find the X6 when it was connected. I don't know what to do now....
Excellent fault analysis. I agree with last poster. If you get lucky and get a temp fix, you should sling files off to another storage device as quickly as possible.
I wish I had a thermal camera when I was working on faults like this. My crude, and sometimes effective, was by way of my index finger used as a temperature probe. Never-the-less we got thing fixed. Good work. BTW I have twelve 500gb Crucial drives! If one were to fail I'll check the capactor(s) too. [edited: spelling mistake}
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.
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.
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
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.
Would second this advice. I panicked when I watched him disconnect and reconnect the drive multiple times.
Agree it happened to me I wanted to show off and took my personal drive to my friends home to show him that I managed to recover my hard drive without any repairs knowledge and than it never get to work and I still have that drive with me for 8 years so that one day I may be able to recover my data from it
Totally agree on this. Whenever someone thinks they have a failing drive, I suggest to not power it again. Every boot could be fatal.
Yeah but this is a solid state drive. Things are different when mechanical thing are in the map
I'd agree, however based on the actual problem, it's safe.
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.
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) 🙄
Have you tried flux atomizers? Alex reviewed one in his channel.
Another thing that work is plain 99% alcohol. See where it dry first.
If you're brave, you just poke around with a finger tip :D
@@kristiankeller4335 Thats reserved for Mehdi from ElectroBoom, it takes talent to do this stuff without dying 😂
Great
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!
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...
@@graealex you mean filtering/EMI suppression*
85% of this video because alex always though all screw holes are ground, he get a new experience today
Thanks for the info bro
Alex knows that for sure. but he assumed with his experience that board like this and in that particular area one leg of the caps should be connected to ground.
I found ssd and hdd that dont use ground on all holes. Stupid
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.
I was yelling at the screen saying the same. Duplicate components in the same layout right next to the one with the issue. I'm not even a repair person.
That satisfaction when things get fixed must feel incredible. Excellent video.
It's his drug. But instead of costing him a fortune, he's making one!
Yes trust me, its a great feeling when you manage to make something work again from the ‘dead’ haha
@@alfa-psi writes not write.
@@alfa-psi and you got trust issues to resolve
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!
Who'd have thought a drive repair could have that much suspense?
for real🤣
I know it's a "English is not my first language" thing so the way he asks questions to himself/viewers(?) adds to the suspense.
Get your popcorn 🍿
SMD thriller
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 !
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.
Nice spot did not notice that.
Now that you said it ,it is
Wow sharp eyes
Ну хоть Петров заметил очевидное)
@@eftekerahmed7299 He is using the new NF-microscope-camera Edition 2 xmas special to watch this video
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. 👍
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
FANSPIN!
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.
this should be ground points at your foot🤣
Yes I noticed it too. Thx
I'm not sure he is aware of how lucky he has been...
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
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
What drive? I have over 100 drives I might have a extra PCB for it, that is if you can try if you swap bios by solder, let me know the make and model and I’ll look
@@AdrianVegaOfficial
Asgard M.2 nvme (1TB)
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.
That could just be flux from the factory, very easy to overlook. Usually I only pay attention to flux that looks like it was burned (with no obvious signs of human rework) since that's more of a tell that something overheated or failed.
I also paid attention to that capacitor area that it might been warm.
good eyes and observations Bob🙏👏🙂🙂
I too know all kinds of things in hindsight. 😋
@@taunteratwill1787 it’s true when they say hindsight is 20/20 😂
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.
Next Level.. That is a work that i wold like to see performing... not as a customer!
As usual, the most effective data recovery tool is a backup...
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! :)
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!
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. ✌️
what matters most is getting the data most efficiently so this method is best for the first try and I like your method if the first method doesn't work because reballing a NAND and then mounting it on a new board brings an added level of risk of damaging the chip and in repair you always have to calculate risk.
that is right I completely agrees with this!
Yah, but here's the problem with that: data recovery labs (most of them) don't have tiers. They have a set fee and it's insanely high for all the reasons you mentioned. However, having worked in a data recovery lab, MAYBE 5% of the drives, tapes, cartridges, and cards that came in required the actual clean rooms and adaptive hardware resources to retrieve the data. When it comes to controlled storage, it is over 50% a component issue and the data chip(s) are fine. Otherwise if the chip itself is damaged you're done anyway and you can give the customer the option to pass it off to a chip restoration specialist if it is that important to them. That gets into the many thousands if not 10s of thousands with no guarantees either.
So, something that took 30 minutes and succeeded still got charged $1499.95 where something that took a week and failed got charged the same. Now that was dealing with 2001 technologies. We still have the same basic tech now, but better, smaller, and 1000x more dense. The electronics are still all the same tho :)
Brazil 🇧🇷?
That smile when it worked, its the same i have when fixing my electronics. Love your work, always learning something new. Thanks.
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
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!
Zero backups are a goldmine for businesses like this. I their position I'd keep quiet on that subject or at minimum raise an eyebrow.
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.
Yes. That's what I would do too
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.
Exactly. The guy must be very inexperienced if he didn't even consider this possibility (at least up until the point I watched).
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.
yep basically thats probably a 120-256GB there the most common out there atm
I still can't believe how small microSD is since it's able to hold 1TB.
@@shorty808100 Actually 1TB drive nowadays doesnt have bigger boards, this is why M.2 drive is small - NAND Chips is very high capacity now. Those 2.5 drives is 2/3-3/4 empty now. Strange why they still dont make them in smaller cases (with possible rail extenders to fit 2.5 mounting holes).
That cap immediately looked bad to me when you first shown the board, so glad you came back to it.
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
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 screw hole not being a ground is the plot twist lol
Nice fix. Always great feeling when you found the problem, fix it and it works then...
Don't know if this has been answered before. So you were removing two things in the end and not replacing them with working parts. It still worked. So my question is: what is the purpose of these two components in the first place if you don't need them to use the drive? Thanks for answering
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.
Except, people usually buy them for a reason, their ultra small size, and not necessarily the only copy of valuable data. It would be dumb to put the only copy of valuable data on any single drive. More concerning to power users that aren't just pulling audio files off, is they tend to have much worse write performance, especially if the design is prone to overheating, for example several Sandisk models yet they have no concern about fixing that, which is mind boggling.
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.
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 also happy to see you get a success in your job like this 21:55. Like you ever said usual " Sometimes you win sometimes you lose we did everything that we could ". And this moment you win your job, I love that.
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)
The more videos i watch, the more i realise i want to get a thermal camera
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.
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.
Great job! Im in IT Support but never saw a repair done like this. I'll be watching for more content.
This is beyond it support lol
@@ua7pyro591it support in the usa does this troubleshooting both software and hardware.
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?
I didn't stay at a Holliday Inn Express , so I will not comment.
lol he thinks he his better then everyone ells he said in the last video that other repair people should stop trying to fix GPPU pins because they lack experience
Why did the bad cap not need to be replaced? Thanks for sharing this video.
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 💯
Good job…
I love your smile when you find the problem and fix the issue.. victory is golden!
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?
Low quality components (you can check videos on youtube about exploding power supply units), bad circuitry, voltage surge, bad power supply, overheating, badly soldered pins on the board...i am not repairing micro components also, but i have degree in electronics and computer science, so i am just saying from experience what i witnessed and from what i learn.
Everything dies.
Capacitor failure!
He already said what the problem was when he removed the ceramic capacitor. Usually the problem with ceramic capacitors is that they short inside because the metal layers melt creating a metal wire inside.
@@ppal64 great explanation
@@ppal64 you sure are right but a possible cause of failure can help us to avoid such mistakes.
You are a MAESTRO and a Shaikh-al-Mashaikh indeed! Bravo from Toronto!
Love your videos!
Nice to see you recover files in the end. I'm sure that's not always the case. Good work!
My thermal camera cost me over $8K. Way before that, we would spray the board with freeze mist, which was nothing more than R12 Freon, we now call that liquid gold! The board would immediately frost up. When we applied current as you did, the trace would thaw out instantly. Most of the older boards were not multi layer. Another method, I have a probe set from HP, one is a current pulser probe and the other is a current probe. By pulsing parts of the circuit with very narrow high current pulses, we were able to move the current tracer around the board and find the nodes. Sometimes we knew what the common failures were and just pull the chip, cheaper than trouble shooting the board. We didn't have the tantalum capacitor failures back then that we have today.
Thanks for sharing the video. BTW, before we had thermal cameras, I would use a non-contact IR thermometer and scan over different parts of the board, not very accurate. I've also burned my fingers touching things on the board that got very hot :(
Jim
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.
Keep in mind that cloud storage is not suitable for all data. As rare as that might be it's unlikely this drive holds such data but the nature of it was unspecified. Either way worth a thought though you would be correct in most all aspects.
Dont ever do cloud back of important and personal files. You have no idea were the files are physically located. No. You do backup on your personal NAS or USB drives.
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!
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.
Yeah that specific one is quite a common SSD given I also have one
Not only do I learn every time I watch, but I love your sense of humor. Thanks for the education and the laughs.
⚠️ Warning: The smile is contagious 😊
He has that funny dad look about him
and I'm infected.....
😊😊
and I'm infected.....
😊😊
Really contagious 😜
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
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.
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!
Always backup your data, folks.
You saved his life,what a great surgeon!!!👏👏👏
This was a master class in forensic electronics troubleshooting.👍
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.
I really do like your approach. Not knowing if it's fixable is nice and more like a real life situation.
I was saying to myself it's not a ground, try another point on the board and you did and found the faulty component, another brilliant video
I followed every step as you showed in the video and i'm very surprised by how this hack works! Thank You!
I have been repairing lot of electronics and in my experience it's the capacitor, resistors , and transistors that usually fails. 90% of time semiconductor chips won't fail frequently.
I had this exact drive 'fail' years ago. The solution was to power it up with no data connection and leave it for several hours and it recovered. Planned to take it out of the laptop and plug it into a SATA power connector in my desktop PC, but it actually worked by just leaving the laptop at the BIOS screen overnight. After that it worked fine again and is still in use as a second drive. Worth trying before taking it apart.
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.
Great troubleshooting skills, a great sense of humor and you got results, nice work! I learned a few tricks from you, thank you Alex.
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.
This guy clearly share knowledge actual repair and troubleshooting. love to watch helpful Videos like this
It's not - we got it - it's you got it - only you will be able to do all this. Wonderful fault finding - thanx for the video
even though i know i did nothing, i cant help but feel proud of myself every time Alex says, "We did a good job"...
I love your channel. I only understand half of it because I'm from Germany but it always fascinates me how you fix things.
man i dont know what it is about fixing things, but for me, its hands down one of the best feelings in life. free climbers got their cliffs, we got being Lazarus to whatever it is were fixing.
when the drive went do-do-do-lew when you disconnected it. that look on your face is the epitome of that feeling. i got catharsis from it even. fist pump moment
This was my line of work when I went self employed though not on computers and peripherals. I decided and retired end of 2019. Didn't have a thermal camera which is a necessity in my opinion. Thank you for this video I enjoyed watching your work and perseverance 👍 Hope your wife doesn't watch this video 🤣😂 🇲🇹
I love how you act surprised and excited that something you hoped will work and it does! ❤
Wives always be ruining your day... Thankfully you were stronger than that and saved it, love how you always walk us through your mistakes.
I fixed two SSD drive this week , the videos here helped. both had shorted capacitors.
Amazing skills!! i do hvac repairs and i know the feeling when you fix a challenging problem.
I love the way you still get excited when it's a fix, even though you do it every day
Your persistence paid off. Well done sir.
That is awesome. You are a lifeline. Always remember to make a backup.
Expert hardware troubleshooting man. Very Impressed.
I am doing a drive recovery with a recovery service right now. $2,750 for an old IDE drive image. No guarantee.
Good detective work. Surface mount components are all black boxes for me but obviously you've had much more experience with such beasts. I had an SSD fail on me recently but couldn't open it, as it was still under warranty. Took it back for fix/replacement just yesterday, my data is probably lost.
Love your videos. Here is my experience with the X6.
I bought the X6 4TB which cost me $569 CAD!!!! First time buyer of Crucial product. The one I received clocked about 35MB/s, more than 25 times slower than advertised. So ok, I have a defective unit. I contacted Crucial and after a bit they agreed to send me a new one.
Except, when it arrived, I had to pay for duties because they put the full value on the invoice, which cost me another $90. This was not what I experienced with returns from other companies over the years, where it is usually indicated that this is a replacement for a defective unit.
So I called the company and was told it is "company policy". So ok, another $90n bucks gone, but at least I have a new working unit; WRONG!!!! The new unit was the same as the old one. So after almost $700, I am stuck with something that belongs in the garbage. Nice work, Crucial.
I have tried on several computers, Lenovo(i7, 7th generation) win10, Surface Pro 6 with i7 win10, and another win7 desktop. So I downloaded the firmware thinking it could fix it. Both the online version and the iso version couldn't even find the X6 when it was connected. I don't know what to do now....
Excellent fault analysis. I agree with last poster. If you get lucky and get a temp fix, you should sling files off to another storage device as quickly as possible.
very nice you talk "what you think" - i think you doing a fantastic job
You sir are genius! Applying voltage and thermal camera to fast find the bad component.
You are indeed a very clever and courageous man - nice fault finding methodology !!
It really worked for me after I look and try some tutorials, yours is the one that worked. Owe you a lot.
I think that model of SSD has to be one of the worst ever made. We've had so many of them go bad at my work. It was so fun watching you fix one!!!! :)
BEEN IN I.T. for 30 years. This the 1st time I've seen an SSD Data Recovered. Congrats.
Dude your are good!!! Your intuition and persistence (plus good tools!!!) wins the day again!!! Well done Sir!!!!
I am amazed by how far you get with so little engineering expertise.
It was 50/50 chance. Other 50% we just will not see :)
Nice freaking work, troubleshooting and diagnostics at its best right there. The feeling in your eyes and voice when you solved it was great.
أحسنت ياعمار برافو عليك
I wish I had a thermal camera when I was working on faults like this. My crude, and sometimes effective, was by way of my index finger used as a temperature probe. Never-the-less we got thing fixed. Good work. BTW I have twelve 500gb Crucial drives! If one were to fail I'll check the capactor(s) too.
[edited: spelling mistake}
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.
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.