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Showing posts from May, 2014

I just fixed my external hard drive. DIY: success!

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Good time to break my string of three long opinionated serious posts for something more light-hearted and fun. Fixing stuff. DIY goodness. Long story short: once upon a time, a few mistakes ago, I dropped my Samsung external hard drive. It was lying on the cold hard ground. Ohhhh ohhhh ohhhh ohhhh ohhhhh, trouble, trouble, trouble. The USB connector inside the drive snapped out of its integrated circuitry (IC). All my hard work torrenting movies now gone. Or maybe not yet. I was determined to get things fixed and I got lucky. I'll explain my "get lucky" moment in a short while. But in the mean time, the best I could do was breaking the drive open. And it took an enormous beating. Forgive the bad focus but you got the idea. Only hard prying could get this thing opened. And I was greeted with this bad boy. Nothing like I had ever seen before. Some technical stuff: normally hard drive connectors are SATA-to-USB which makes accessing data from