Secrets to FIXING YOUR EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE! Important Information on "dead" EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES!

Thousands of people every day experience what at first seems that their external USB or Thunderbolt HD, either 2.5" portable or 3.5" desktop model is dying, is dead, or all hope is lost for it. Good news is that you have roughly a greater than 50-60% chance that your external hard drive is perfectly fine!




The great news at the end of the tunnel of an apparently failed or failing external hard drive.

When checked on another computer, and with no need for spending money on data extraction expertise or software, the very likely case is that your external USB or thunderbolt HD is in fact fine, and merely the card interface, or SATA bridge card has failed or is failing. Keeping a HD dock around handy, or cheaper still a $20 hard drive enclosure or a SATA to USB connector can be a real life saver in getting your drive back to use, when the drive itself is fine, and merely its interface card has gone bad.

The SATA bridge card inside a USB external HD has a very high failure rate in general

What exactly is the SATA bridge card in your external HD?

In the middle to late of 2009, most all external hard drives both in 2.5" and 3.5" reached the shelves in SATA III. These small SATA cards or "bridges" are used to translate between the hard drives' interfaces and the enclosures' external ports (USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire). Additionally these small bridges not only transfer power but also of course the data. Unfortunately these SATA bridge cards have a very high failure rate as they are burdened with shuffle power and data.




Literally these little unreliable and fragile cards are the power conduits and the nervous system for all external HD data transfer.