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I have managed to gather a huge collection of dead storage disks (USB drive and external hard drives). Some of them are my own and some of them from office. They have all completely stopped responding and I have tried to run all diagnostics (software based) on them but of no use.

Is there a way to recover the dead disk drives using a hardware? So that I can open it and plug the piece where the data is stored (on old disk) on another hardware and access the files?

If anybody has come across such a commercial product, DIY tutorial or knows how to do it, I will appreciate if you can please share the link or your knowledge on this subject.

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The normal method would be to remove the drive and get an USB to IDE/SATA connector. Plug the drive into that and see if you can see the drive. If so, the external case was the problem. If not or if you can see the drive, but not read it, you could then try and connect it directly to the IDE or SATA interface on your motherboard and use something like Spinrite to try and see if it can be fixed. Nothing that I'm aware of can reliably test a drive on a generic USB external interface.

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I assume by "dead" you mean physically they no longer function. My understanding is that under these circumstances their are two options, but I don't know the details. Option 1 is if you a functioning identical drive you can remove the magnetic disc from the broken drive to the working one. This is risky, and I believe only works with identical drives so that the driver works correctly. Option 2 is a manual magnetic reader that you hold and use to manually scan the removed magnetic disc. I have no idea what can be done with flash drives.

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