I bought a WD Elements SE Portable 500GB (2.5 Inch / USB 2.0) WDBABV5000ABK external hard drive in 2011. In January this year, some of the partitions started vanishing all of a sudden. A few days later, the drive stopped getting detected at all when inserted. I’ve tried using a new microUSB WD cable. No detection. It’s full of data and I don’t want to send it to WD before getting the data. I also don’t want to spend on data recovery services.
Here’s some more info:
Since many months the WD USB cable seemed to cause the drive to stop spinning and turning/twisting the cable and moving the drive a little would make it start spinning again. I guess it wasn’t the cable causing this problem but the micro USB connector on the drive.
I’ve carefully opened the drive after seeing a few videos on YouTube on how to open it from its casing. There’s no attaching connector like on most external hard drives. There’s just the USB connector directly soldered on to the drive PCB. Along with this, there’s another 12-pin (6 + 6) connector. I wonder whether some kind of cable can be connected to this 12-pin connector to retrieve the data. I’ve never heard of or seen such a connector before so it’s not a standard one.