Repair Hard Drive

Did you know that to repair hard drive technology, in particular, the PCB that you do not always have to do a donor swap? In fact there are two things that can kill the whole idea of a donor swap. First, You may not be able swap the logic card. Finding a logic card is not always possible when you either do not have a donor drive or the donor may hard or impossible to find. Second, there are ROM chips that need to be reprogrammed on the donor.

Did you know that replacing the PCB from a hard drive that appears to be exactly the same but is not could end with the hard drive going up in smoke? If you have an exact match to the PCB, the risk is minimal ;however, the firmware code can change overtime even with exact matching parts.

Changing code means: if you were to purchase two NEW identical hard drives from the same batch and then swapped there PCB's(logic boards), your success is highly probable.
Try that same scenario with a few months of heavy activity and the result could be a failure. The reason for this deals with what is called SMART.

"Its called SMART Technology where the hard drive is designed to reconfigure itself during operation to maximizing performance and protecting data.  If a sector is read slow but functional the drive will remap this sector as bad and move this sector creating changes to track and sector information in firmware
Now this new reconfigured information is unique to the drive, and can cause this PCB to be incompatible with any other drive of matching numbers."

The above quote and more information about PCB repair can be found here