[netsharc]

Might as well share mine: one day the magic smoke[0] left a lot of components on my PC, including the HD with no backups. I saw the board was replacable, so that's what I did: bought an identical disk on eBay, some torx screwdrivers, transplated the good board to the dead disk, and it worked perfectly fine.

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/magic-smoke.html

[hinkley]

I've heard tell that some data recovery companies have a stable of the controller cards from popular drive models. If swapping the card works, you get your data cheap. Beyond that it gets spendy.

[jaclaz]

Only for the record until soome 15 years ago, exchanging boards was easy, later disk PCB's contrain some "adaptive" data into a (soldered) EPROM (or Flash/whatever, anyway a memory chip), so now you have to de-solder the chip from the old board and re-solfer it on the new one.

There are dedicated hardwares+softwares (as an example the "PC-3000") that are capable of re-programming the chip on the new board with data extracted from the chip on the old board or to re-program them anew, but they are very pricey and only data recovery companies can afford them and the connected training/resources.

So:

1) simple card swapping won't work on any disk manufactured since (roughly) 2005 (possibly even earlier)

2) card swapping can still be made BUT you need to "migrate" the chip from the old board, it is usually an 8-pin SMD so it is doable at home, but not exactly easy-peasy if you are not familiar and experienced in dde-soldering and soldering

[londons_explore]

Nearly all drive failures today are either control electronics or bearings.

Control electronics can be replaced. Bearings can be overcome with a higher motor drive current.

Some drives have crypto keys stored in flash - those are harder to fix.

[Stratoscope]

You were lucky that it was only the magic smoke that escaped, and not the pixie dust on the platters.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hard+drive+pixie+dust