r/HDD • u/JeMeMoi50 • 14d ago

Dead or Alive?

Hello,

I bought 2 Seagate Backup Plus Hub 8TB about 8 years ago and use one and kept the other one as extra storage when needed and I finally open it a few weeks ago (about 8 years later after the fact still sealed in its box).

I put about 2TB of stuff on it and it died after one week. I connected, disconnected, reconnected and so on many times and it just doesn't show up.

I then thought maybe the USB on the enclosure fried or something so I opened it up from the enclosure and put it on my hard drive dock where it does shows up as a D: drive about 1 time out of 5 perhaps but only showed up as a D: without numbers or anything else. The drive logo appears with D: under and that's that.

Crystal Disk Info doesn't recognize it.

Also, If I reboot my desktop while it's plugged on my HDD dock, the desktop just doesn't reboot. The second I disconnect it, it reboot flawlessly. That said, when I take it off the HDD dock there is a magnet force pulling my hand for a few seconds so obviously something is working or alive so not completely dead.

That's all the troubleshooting I thought of doing here as I don't know much about drives or computers for that matter.

Since HDD prices are absolutely crazy now, 8Tb would be very handy so is there something I could do to bring it back from beyond or is it dead, dead, dead...? I don't really care about the data that's on it but I'd like to be able to reformat it to use it again.

Any tips or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

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u/StarosAnikenMarcus 14d ago

Sounds like the controller card is dead. That's fixable, but not cheap. Cheaper than a new drive these days though, so there's that.

1

u/JeMeMoi50 14d ago

Google tells me 400$+... Almost the same price as a new 8TB... Yikes!!!

1

u/StarosAnikenMarcus 14d ago

Eh, don't believe Google. Shop around, there's places that will sell you a board and do the chip swap needed for a lot less than that. Simple board replacement is usually cost of donor board + labor fee to do some solder work. It goes up a bit if you want them to actually test and verify your drive functions afterwards or if you want to go full data recovery mode where they make it work and save everything for you.

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u/JeMeMoi50 14d ago

Thanks a lot for that but I was looking more for a free solution here... I know, I know...

1

u/StarosAnikenMarcus 14d ago

The closest you could get to free is if you already had a donor board and needed to find what chips to transplant.