HDD dead?

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Terodius

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This morning I woke up to a rather unpleasant surprise: one of my hdds stopped working. For the past year I've been using external hdds with my laptop, but I recently finished building my new gaming rig and I wanted to put the hdds in the case to have less clutter on my desk. However for some reason they wouldn't be recognized when plugged into the SATA ports of the mobo, so I had to temporarily copy the files to an extra hdd, and then one by one install the hdd, format it, get it recognized and copy the data back to it. This worked ok for my first two 2TB Caviar Green drives. I was going to get started with the 1st 3TB one this morning but as I mentioned before it's sorta dead. Let me explain:
- I can hear and feel the drive spin up
- I have tried with multiple SATA ports to no avail, the drive isn't recognized by windows nor the BIOS and doesn't come up at the post.
- I have tried with 5 different USB/SATA dongles from all the other external drives, and double checked that they all work by trying them on a healthy drive.
- There's no rattling or any sort of overheating in the dead drive.
- I've tried multiple data recovery software to no avail, the drive isn't recognized in any of them.
- The drive was not dropped, mishandled, or damaged in any way.

So I've been doing some reading and I think it might be the PCB, but I don't see any burn marks on it and I don't have the proper screw driver to take it out. I'm also a little anxious about taking out the PCB from a perfectly healthy drive in case some sort of short circuit that damaged the first one and might burn the second one as well. I don't have any critical data in that drive. I had a little over 2TB of TV series, but it took me almost 3 years to get that collection and I will do anything short of paying thousands of dollars for data recovery to get it back (I might as well buy all the Blu-rays and DVDs for that kind of money). I don't understand why the drive would have failed so early in its life. I've had it for less than 6 months and it's stayed on my desk 99% of its lifetime. However the 2TB drives I've taken around in my bagpack on countless trips and have used them much more heavily and they still work perfectly.

So if anybody can think of something I'm missing, or knows another possible solution, please help me out. I'll try to get the screwdriver to switch out the PCB but I wanna do that as a last resource and when I'm 100% positive that there's no other option.
 
If I am not mistaken, 3TB drives have a rather high failure rate... You might be able to get it checked out under warranty? Sometimes they attempt to save your data if possible.
 
I tried calling the vendor I ordered the drive from and they told me they will replace the drive but not cover data recovery services. I know people say it's dumb not to back up, but when you have 10TB of files to backup it gets a little hard to do a daily backup. I'm gonna go ahead and switch out the PCB, see if that works, and if not well I guess I'm screwed...
 
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