EC02-015_10 - How To Possibly Save Your Iomega Hard Drive If You Need Part EC02-015_10

Hard drives fail..this is a fact. However, sometimes it SEEMS like a hard drive fails when it actually doesn't. I have a 1 terabyte iOmega drive that looks very stylish and sleek in its black case. However, that drive stopped working recently and I was about to lose my mind. Windows stopped recognizing the USB drive and I thought I was going to have to use my advanced skills of persuasion to coax my data out of that drive. As it turned out, I needed no such skill to get the hard drive back up and running.

I am a bit of a tinkerer. I like to open computerized things up and see what is inside. So when this drive that was already out of warranty stopped working, I opened it up. The first thing I noticed after getting the iOmega case off was that the white part of the USB port was disconnected from the silver USB casing area. That meant that the USB cord I was plugging into the drive was not making a love connection. Sad, sad, sad. Without that connection, the computer would fail to recognize that the drive was plugged in. I took down the part number EC02-015_10 and went online to find it. Well, to my shear surprise, the part was $95 in one place and $215 at another company. Say what? I AM NOT spending that much money on a part when the drive itself was about $100 bucks. That is just stupid. The drive was a 1 TB Samsung drive. It was the type of drive that is used inside of desktop machines - very normal, nothing extraordinary. It was totally clear to me that the drive could be put into any hard drive case and still function. The drive has a SATA 300 pin connection. I decided to find a case for the drive.

I found a case for the drive from Diablotek. The case was about $10. I added the drive to the new case, plugged it in and bada-boom - it worked! I could access my files and life was good.

The moral of this story is that you should not panic when your hard drive case decides to break, iOmega should fix that USB connector issue AND you should never pay more for a part than you do for a hard drive. I discovered that I am not the only person having the USB issue.