Up until this week, I never really noticed any issues with head compatibilities with these drives and even recently did a successful recovery of a drive with severely damaged heads with the follow patient and donor:
Patient (Donor)
Model: ST2000LM003 (ST2000LM003)
FW: 2BC10006 (2BC10008)
PN: HN-M201RAD/AV1 (HN-201RAD/AV1)
Date: 11/2014 (07/2015)
Country: China (China)
SN: S34R... (S34R...)
Preamp: 5565 (2958)
So, I was perplexed when I used a donor with the same preamp on a drive that only has 1 of 6 heads (head 5) that is dead and detects and mirrors the other heads at full speed, with a few read errors along the way. When powered on with the donor heads, I just get a cycle of terminal errors and the drive just never comes ready.
In an attempt to look for something else on the drive that differentiates the models, I noticed that for the first case, both patient and donor had a 7C REV A on the PCB sticker and with my current case, the patient has a 5C REV A and the donor has 7C REV A. I've got a donor ordered with the 5C REV A PCB, but I wanted to test my theory while I await.
So, I grabbed to donor drives with the 7C REV A PCB and swapped the PCB and sure enough, both drives powered and detected without issue. Yet, when I put the patient 5C REV A PCB onto either of those 7C REV A drives, I get the same terminal errors that I got when I swapped the heads.
Meanwhile, a peer data recovery lab owner contacted me yesterday, coincidentally having the same issue, which actually motivated me to start on this journey. This morning he reported back that his issue was that his patient was the 7C and first donor was the 5C, but when he applied my theory of matching the 7C donor to the patient, it worked. So, at this point, it seems that my theory is true, but don't hold me to it until we get a few more examples under our belt.
Hope this helps. If it does, please post your head swap details in this thread, making special note of the first line of the PCB sticker.