USB Hard Drive Head Swap Tips

To have the highest physical head swap success rate for USB hard drives, it’s important to learn some head swap tips. USB hard drives are equal to SATA hard drives plus USB connector into one and therefore, it’s possible to change the USB hard drives to SATA hard drives and then operate on it for data recovery.

SATA data transfer is more stable than USB data transfer in many situations especially when the drives have bad sectors, weak heads or unstable head status or after the head swap.

When users receive damaged USB portable hard drives, the very first thing is to learn what happened to the drive, dopped or not, how long this drive has been used and if the USB hdd is password protected or not;

Users need to check if the USB interface is damaged or not;

Users need to connect the USB hdd to pc and see if the hdd can be detected or not, whether the usb hdd is clicking or not;

For clicking USB hard drives, it’s suggested to backup the ROM first and then swap PCB and write the data hdd ROM to the donor PCB and see if the clicking continues or not. Some clicking noises are caused by the USB interface or the PCB damage;

For clicking USB hard drives, it’s suggested to swap the USB PCB with compatible SATA PCB and transfer the ROM chip and then perform head swap, this will add to the success rate. If users keep the USB PCB, after head swap, the hdd can be clicking too even if the heads match;

For USB hard drive data recovery, if users don’t want to convert the USB interface to SATA, or don’t want to solder the ROM chips, users can try some professional USB hdd recovery equipment such as the DFL-URE USB3.0 data recovery tool. When the USB hdd is still detected, with many bad sectors or weak heads, this equipment can help a lot to get data back without manual work of converting USB to SATA. But if the USB interface is damaged or the USB hdd has severe firmware issue which USB interface can not be properly handle, converting USB to SATA is a must.