A research group at Warwick keeps raw imaging output on 20TB desktop drives, one per project, because the volumes are too large for the shared storage they are allocated. One of them went off a bench when a cable snagged. It stopped being detected on the spot. The group sent it back to the manufacturer under warranty, the recovery arm attached to that returns process opened a file, reported mechanical damage and quoted a figure the department could not authorise. The postdoc who rang wanted to know whether a mechanical diagnosis meant the data was gone or merely that it was expensive.
| Media | A 20TB Seagate desktop drive that fell while connected and has not been detected since. A recovery service reached under a warranty return had already examined it and reported mechanical damage. |
| What was reported | 20TB Seagate external, knocked off a bench, no longer detected on any machine, an earlier service reported mechanical damage and quoted for it, the group asking whether the diagnosis was also a refusal. |
| Fault class | Impact damage to the head assembly. A fall while the platters are turning throws the heads out of position and often breaks a slider off its suspension, after which the drive cannot find its own service area and never introduces itself to the host. The recorded surfaces are ordinarily untouched provided the drive is not run afterwards. |
| On the bench | Left as it arrived rather than tested, since a drive with damaged heads teaches you nothing on a second power-up and can lose you a great deal. Profiled on a current-limited bench supply so the start attempt could be read as a trace, then opened under laminar flow with the head assembly and all surfaces examined under a stereo microscope. A matched donor head stack was fitted and the alignment set. Imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA head by head, the filesystem parsed in R-Studio and the image sets checked against the group's own manifest before release. |
The first lab was right, and being right is not the same as being final. Mechanical damage is a description of what has broken, not a judgement about what can be reached. It means the moving parts have to be replaced before anything can be read, which is work with a well established method behind it. What the report did not say, because it was not asked, was whether the recording surfaces were marked, and that is the question that actually decides these jobs.
High-capacity drives fall differently from small ones. A 20TB unit carries a stack of thin platters at close spacing, and there is very little room between them for a head that has been knocked sideways. That makes the immediate impact more likely to break something, and it also makes a subsequent power-up more dangerous, because a bent arm swinging over a surface at speed does far more harm in a 20TB drive than in an old 500GB one.
Not being detected is consistent with good news. Before a drive will answer a host it has to read its own service area from the platters, where its calibration tables live. Heads that cannot fly cannot read that area, so the drive stays silent even though everything the group cares about is sitting intact a few millimetres away. Silence is frightening and is frequently the least destructive symptom there is.
Head count is what makes the quotation move, not capacity. A drive this size has a tall stack, and a donor has to match it closely enough for the alignment to hold. That is a sourcing problem rather than a technical unknown, and it is why the first quotation was large. The published figure on this bench does not scale with terabytes: one drive is one drive.
Nothing was connected to a host. On the current-limited supply the drive drew a start current and then held it, with none of the step changes a healthy spin-up shows, which is what a head assembly fouling the surface looks like from outside. That was enough to open it rather than probe further electrically.
Under laminar flow one slider had separated from its suspension and two others were visibly out of plane. The platters were examined across every surface at magnification and found unmarked, which is the reward for the group having unplugged the drive at the moment it fell rather than trying it on a second machine. A matched donor stack went in, the alignment was set, and imaging ran on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA head by head so a weak surface could be given its own passes. R-Studio parsed the filesystem out of the finished image.
The whole archive came back, checked against the group's own manifest file so nobody had to take a sector count on trust. Two experiment folders had a handful of unreadable sectors between them and those were listed by name; everything else read clean on the first pass.
One drive is £300 + VAT regardless of how many terabytes are on it. Opening it and fitting donor parts is physical work, so 50% of the figure was settled before the bench started and the balance once the department had verified the archive.
A mechanical report is worth having and worth reading carefully. Ask two things: were the recording surfaces examined, and were they marked. Those answers, not the words mechanical damage, tell you whether a second opinion is worth the postage. A drive with displaced or broken heads and clean platters is ordinary work. A drive with scored platters is a different conversation and the honest version of it involves partial results. In the meantime do not power it up to see whether it has come back to itself; on a large modern drive that is the single most expensive minute available to you. Send the unit whole if it is an external in its own case, keep the original packaging out of the equation and use a rigid box, and pass on the earlier report if you have one, because it saves the bench repeating work you have already paid for.
What this job cost, and on what terms. This one was charged at £300 + VAT, the figure agreed in writing before any work began. Paying for a job like this one. This file sits in the half the guarantee does not reach. Four sorts of work are excluded from no fix, no fee and there are no others: DVR jobs, forensic jobs, chip-level work, and electronic or mechanical failure. On any of them half the quoted figure is settled before the bench starts, with the remainder due when the files go back. Everything outside those four — a deletion, a formatted card, a broken file system, a lost partition, and firmware or service-area repair, which counts as logical however it sounds — runs under no fix, no fee, so an attempt that fails costs nothing.
If yours is doing the same thing. This drive was read at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park, about fifty-five miles down the M40. Post it tracked and insured, send it by a courier you book yourself, or bring it to the Oxford reception during Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm — there is no collection service and no counter in Coventry. The free look at it takes two working days from booking in and produces one written figure that then holds.
Freephone 0800 689 0668 to talk it through first. The shipping form and what goes in the parcel are on the contact page, and every band is published in full — including which work sits outside no fix, no fee.
These are real enquiries, from households and from businesses in Coventry and out across Warwickshire — Nuneaton and Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Kenilworth, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon, Atherstone and Southam. Names are gone: the customer, the company, the job title, anything at all that would point back at a person. What stays is the reasoning — what turned up, where the fault genuinely sat, which approach it demanded, and which machine on the bench did the work. One of the thirty-six was refused, and it earns a place here as squarely as any of the rest.
Liquid attacks the connections long after it has dried, which is why powering it up is the wrong first move
The component that failed spectacularly and the component holding the photographs are not the same one
Enumerating and reading are two different jobs, and only one of them needs the platters to turn
Been quoted for mechanical damage elsewhere? Ring 0800 689 0668. A second assessment is free, a single drive is £300 + VAT, and the platters are examined before anything is agreed.