7 Signs You Have Hard Drive PCB Failure
Signs That You Have Hard Drive PCB Failure: hard disk completely unresponsive, burning smells from the drive, loads slowly or power surge failure.Read More!
Hard drive PCB failures are among the most notorious tech problems calling for data recovery. Fortunately, certified extraction experts can handle these issues effectively.
Hard Drive PCB Failure

When a server motherboard or case fan dies, it’s painfully obvious which component has a problem. For that you’ll need a seasoned hard disk drive data recovery service. But if you can’t reach one life grows exponentially tougher. Each storage device contains its own ecosystem of firmware, discrete components, and the printed circuit boards, or PCBs, that tie them all together.
As a result, it isn’t always possible to eyeball a dead hard drive and instantly know what went awry.
Hard Drive Anatomy and PCB

Hard drives contain spinning disks whose surfaces have millions of tiny magnetic areas, or cells. A moving arm inside the drive uses an electromagnet to change the orientation of the fields associated with each cell. Since the fields persist after being set, you can read them later to recover what you stored.
PCBs make all of this decoding, encoding, reading and writing action possible. Sort of like the nervous system of the drive, PCBs contain microcontrollers and other electronics that control the moving arm, the spinning disk motors and the data processing activity.
Understanding a Potential PCB Problem
PCBs control everything that your drives do. This means that PCB failures come in a lot of different varieties and bring distinctive symptoms along with them. At TTR Data Recovery, we make it our job to make an accurate diagnosis, but you can help the process along by asking yourself some basic questions:
- Is the drive completely unresponsive?
- Does powering on the computer produce a burning or smoky smell
- Does the drive overheat faster than normal?
- If the computer recognizes the drive, is it reporting incorrect status information, such as device sizes, storage volume capacities orpartitioning schemes?
- Is the computer complaining that the drive needs to be formatted?
- Is it taking forever to open files or run applications that write lots of data to disk?
- Are strange errors cropping up in files?
Related Article: SSD VS HDD

Dead Hard Drive can really be a headache especially when your life’s work are all stored in it. Here’s some guide for you to get started on How To Recover Data From a Dead Hard Drive.
How can you draw the distinction between a PCB problem and other types of drive failures? The surest solution is to talk to an expert. Many circuit issues and component failures don’t present any obvious signs, so testing the PCB itself may be the most effective fix.
To complete this kind of work, you need safety equipment like ESD protection, years of training and professional connections with the manufacturers who produced the hardware in the first place.
Looking on the Bright Side
If there’s a “nice” aspect of hard drive PCB failures, it’s the fact that they’re often limited in scope. For instance, a failure that stops a PCB from activating the magnetic read/write head might not cause any further harm if the drive automatically goes into a failure mode.
Many nicer modern hard drives can also perform self-error checking and send you messages when problems occur.
SATA Hard Drives are one of the best storage out there where you can safely place your money upon.
PCB Failures Don't Fix Themselves

When it comes to performing an actual logical hard drive data recovery, PCB issues aren’t the biggest hurdles in the world. With the right tools and environments, technicians can repair or replace the damaged PCB with a new one and extract your data.
No hard drive failure is a good thing. When you’re facing PCB problems, however, you can take comfort in knowing that there are possibilities. Our internal and portable hard drive recovery experts with certified clean rooms can restore your information without compromising your data security or privacy. Talk to the experts at TTR Data Recovery today.

About the AuthorTommy Khamoushi, Data Recovery Expert
Tommy Khamoushi is an IACRB-certified Data Recovery Engineer and a Certified Forensic Computer Investigator. He has more than 20 years of experience in data recovery including providing technical support for the House of Representatives.
Tommy leads a team of data recovery engineers and experts at TTR Data Recovery to recover highly sensitive data for government agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and enterprise businesses using advanced and proprietary techniques and processes.
Connect with Tommy on LinkedIn.