Do I need to remove my hard drive before selling my water damaged iPad?

rockhillvalley wrote:

Yes, I understand that...the NAND flash drive is welded to the motherboard. My question is really whether there is any way to retrieve personal information from the drive once it has been water damaged. Thanks.

There's always a way. The question is why would anyone expend the time and expense to retrieve data off your damaged iPad. The chances of it happening are very low. The people who have the knowledge to do this would likely not be the least bit interested in your data. And just who would you sell a non functioning iPad to anyway?

Chances are the damage to your ipad isn't the drive. It's the mother board or power supply that's been shorted out. I'm basing this on me having washed a few flash drives in my lifetime, and once they dry out the data is still there and perfectly fine.

Theoretically, sure, they could restore it. The question comes down to, as others have said, do they want to? Are they going to part out your machine? If so, then someone else's ipad could end up with your flash drive in it....but their interest really isn't going to be your data. It'll be them wiping things so they can sell the part as 'functional but used'.

Your data is as safe as the integrity of the tech parting out your machine.

The iPad doesn't have a hard drive, it has a flash drive. If you want to remove the flash drive, you will have to tear some of the iPad apart.

If the drive is not completely damaged, it is possible to recover some or maybe all of the data with the proper equipment and software which would probably not be cheap. Unless you are top secret spy, I doubt anyone would go to that much trouble.