Our data recovery team recently carried out work on a Toshiba external hard drive that had suffered from a head crash – here’s how they got on.
The client’s external hard drive – a 2.5” Toshiba Canvio Basics with a storage capacity of 1TB – arrived at our Cardiff office early last week. One of our team had previously spoken to the client over the phone, where it was explained that the external hard drive had suddenly stopped working, and was making a scratching noise when connected to a power supply. The client was supplied with a unique job reference number that was enclosed with the device, allowing it to be carefully tracked wherever it went. The external hard drive was then passed on to our hard drive recovery team for a free diagnosis. We provide a free diagnosis for all devices that are sent to us, in order to ascertain whether or not data recovery is possible; no cost is incurred unless agreed to.
Upon inspection, it was apparent that the hard drive had suffered from a head crash, and the sound heard by the client was the read/write heads coming into contact with the platter. A hard drive’s read/write heads hover a few nanometres above the platters, so if they are even slightly misaligned, it can spell trouble. Thankfully, the client didn’t repeatedly power up the drive and attempt to get it working, so the platter damage was minimal. The client accepted the no-obligation quote, donor parts were sourced from our library, and the client’s data was recovered, around 200GB in total. A secure link was sent to the client for them to download their data via an FTP server.
If in doubt, always get in touch with a professional data recovery specialist. Attempting to undertake data recovery at home runs the risk of causing further damage to your device, and potentially losing your data permanently. Our data recovery team have decades of combined experience working with hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, SD cards, tapes, RAID arrays, and more. We provide a free data recovery diagnosis, file listing and no-obligation quote to all of our clients.
