Indeed, it appears that this TVS did exactly what it was supposed to do -- die First before all the other stuff Would! (Forgot you had er, REVERSED POLARITY as in, bad-Scott.) I've learned to look always at that 'little-tent' in the Molexes. Too lazy to troubleshoot the consequences.

Concur re ever trusting the thing again.. with $/TB decreasing as we speak, it isn't even worth My time to futz with the stuff I was suggesting, except: data recovery doesn't care about practicality.
(Maybe the dead-short failure-mode is also intentional? All switchers would shut-down for that - right?)

Info == power! You got the exact component without a tedious tracing sans schematic.
(But I think it would have been more Fun.. had it been a fixable 'Open' inside!)

Could the Why of the new board's failure to communicate -- be a firmware thing? Go to all that trouble and find ... you have to match some firmware to a specific run of drives, etc. == bummer.

Congrats on Success!


I.