Wow. That’s cool. I bet that that is what they do when you pay someone to recover a hard drive (or the FBI does it).
Not all the time but my guess is hard drive recovery companies have an inventory of logic boards that they simply swap onto the failed hard drive. Then retrieve the data from it for the customer. The usual is that the logic boards fail before the spinning platters do.
More on these swaps>>>> http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-word-of-warning-on-hard-disk-recovery-by-swapping-logic-boards/#!