Yeah I know what you mean Dade. I think the problem is that the boards are made as part of a unit and I dont think that they can absolutely guarantee that a board they make now, while work on your 1-3 years old HDD.
PS: Most HDD's do come with a 5 year warranty, so you can normally get them replaced for free.
The board has to come from a drive with the exact same specs(model/revision/size/make) to work. Different revisions might work but i've never really had spare drives to test that with. But as you said they come with long warrantees so this generally shouldn't be a problem.
Yes, i've been an idiot and never kept any of my warranty stuff, but rest assured I've lost too many and will be doing this from now on!
7200.11 range had bricking issues, at my previous job we lost 1tb the same way, but the data recovery guy got it working again, albeit R3K later for disk repair and data retrieval . . .
If you know someone who can give something like that a bash you may still have a working disk, just needs fixing of the firmware.
