Hard drive motor failure is one of the most common physical faults our data recovery team face, and if not dealt with quickly, can lead to irreversible data loss.
A client phoned us explaining that her desktop PC had started making a beeping noise, intermittent with stuttering. She phoned a local computer repair store, who diagnosed a hard drive fault, but were unable to give more detail. The drive, a WD Blue 1TB model, arrived into our Cardiff office with its unique job reference number, which followed it throughout the drive’s journey with us. The hard drive was booked into the system and immediately sent to the technical team for a free data recovery diagnostic test. Our data recovery team will look at any hard drive, or indeed any device that can store data, free of charge. Once a diagnosis is made, a quote to complete the data recovery work will be sent out to the client, who can accept or decline. If there is no data, no fee is paid.
In this instance, our data recovery technicians found that the WD hard drive had suffered from a motor failure. The hard drive was disassembled in our class 100 clean room, where all physical data recovery takes place; this ensures an environment free of contaminants, which can cause further complications with regards to data recovery. Upon inspection, it was apparent to the data recovery technicians that the hard drive had suffered a motor failure.
A hard drive is a mechanical device with numerous moving parts, including the spindle motor, which spins the platters at rates of thousands of revolutions per minute. Modern hard drives generally spin at speeds between 5,400 or 7,200 RPM, while enterprise-level drives can reach 150,000 RPM. When a hard drive’s motor becomes damaged, it can cause damage to the platters where the data is physically stored. This WD hard drive’s motor was in the early stages of failure, and the client’s quick thinking likely saved her data, which was recovered in full.
