Can somebody please tell me what this piece is called my hard drive stopped working and I believe it's because of this motherboard type thing inside my external hard drive much appreciated thank you.
that is the chipset of an external enclosure, it doesn't have a specific name as all enclosures have their own (and each is different when you change model) and you can place the hdd in a new one if that is broken.
What makes you think that the chipset is broken?
My hard drive is not working while it is plugged into it...I bought a USB 2.0 to sata/hard drive adaptor and it works fine.....but not while plugged into this....the blue light shows power on but not reading it? What dou think? We're can I buy one of these or is it cheaper to buy a whole new external ?
It's cheaper to just use the SATA to USB adapter you have. That adapter is basically the same thing as the board in your broken enclosure. For some reason all external drives fail at some point and it is usually the electronics in the enclosure that fails and not the drive.
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