While portable hard drives are a convenient way of backing up or moving data, they are susceptible to physical damage.
A client phoned our office after she heard a beeping noise coming from within her portable hard disk drive (HDD). The drive, a Seagate One Touch Portable with a 2TB storage capacity, had years’ worth of family photos. Knowing that the sound coming from within the HDD, she got in touch with Data Recovery Specialists. After being talked through the process by one of our call handlers, she sent the drive into our data recovery lab for a free diagnosis and no-obligation quote.
Our data recovery team disassembled the hard drive in our class 100 clean room, where all physical data recovery is performed. It is important not to open a hard drive at home, as this can make the problem worse. Because a mechanical HDD relies on moving parts, including the spindle motor which hovers a fraction of a millimetre above the spinning platters, even a single particle of dust can ruin the chances of a successful data recovery. A clean room environment allows our data recovery technicians to undertake work safely. Attempting physical data recovery at home is definitely advised against if you want a chance of seeing your data again.
Upon disassembling the hard drive in the clean room, there was some visible damage to the platters, indicating that the HDD had suffered from a head crash, A head crash is when the read/write heads, which are found on the end of a hard drive’s actuator arm, crash onto the spinning magnetic platters. Head crashes can occur for a variety of reasons, such as a particle of dust getting inside, or just the age of the hard drive. However, as their name suggests, portable HDDs may frequently be moved around, as was the case with this client’s Seagate One Touch. This means they are more prone to knocks and bumps that you wouldn’t get in a static desktop hard drive.
Donor parts were found, and our data recovery team began the process of recovering as much of the client’s data as possible. While the data recovery was a success, not everything was saved – around 90%. If data, or parts of a file, are stored on a portion of the drive that has been physically scratched away, data recovery will be physically impossible. The data was then transferred onto a new hard drive, sent into us by the client, and returned by courier.
All of our data recovery work includes a free diagnostic check, along with a report of the fault with your device, and a no-obligation quote. If you choose to accept the quote, we will begin the data recovery process; however, if we can’t get your data back, you won’t pay a penny. If the quote is declined, your device, whether it’s a hard drive, solid-state drive, SD card, or tape, will be returned to you courier, free of charge.
