Four product lines wear this badge and they break in four different ways: the coloured desktop and network disks, the portable and mains-powered externals, the Ultrastar rack drives that came down from IBM by way of Hitachi, and the SanDisk flash. One drive is £300 + VAT, and the examination that tells you which of them you are holding costs nothing.
One Western Digital disk or solid state drive is £300 + VAT, and the examination in front of it is free. A My Passport, a bare Blue out of a tower, an Ultrastar off a rack shelf — the same band. Several disks behind one badge, a multi-bay My Cloud included, is array work from £500 + VAT.
More storage in this county carries this name than any other, and a fair amount of what it now covers was bought rather than designed. That is dull company history in a shop and useful information at a bench, because a drive gets treated according to where it came from rather than according to the label on the lid. Four distinct lines arrive here wearing the same badge, and they do not fail in the same way or land in the same price band.
The first is the coloured consumer and NAS range — Blue, Black, Red, Purple, Gold — which is what most people mean when they ring about a WD. The second is the external catalogue: My Passport, My Book, Elements, Easystore and the My Cloud network boxes, which are those same mechanisms sold inside a case with a board in front of them. The third is the enterprise branch, sold as Ultrastar and until recently as HGST, and that line traces back through Hitachi to IBM's original disk division. The fourth is flash: WD-badged solid state drives, the SN-series blades in most current laptops, and everything SanDisk has made since 2016.
Two questions decide the band and neither of them is the badge. How many disks are involved, and did the hardware fail or only the data. One disk or one solid state drive is £300 + VAT. Cards, sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. Anything with several disks behind it, a My Cloud with two or four bays included, is array work from £500 + VAT and moves with the member count. A disk out of a video recorder is £400 + VAT. Hard drive recovery sets out the flat single-disk band for every make, and this page deals with what is specific to this one.
This badge spans a portable in a coat pocket and the Ultrastar disks in a rack at a distribution park, and six descriptions cover most of the booking sheet. None of them tells you on its own whether the fault is electronic, firmware or mechanical, which is precisely why the examination exists and why nobody is charged for it.
The light comes on, the machine may chime, and nothing shows in Explorer or Disk Management. On bus-powered 2.5-inch units the interface board and the socket it is soldered to give up considerably more often than the mechanism behind them, which makes this the better of the two answers. Hunting for a seventh USB port does not help and every attempt spins up a drive that may already be hurt.
The gap between head and platter on a portable is a fraction of a micron, so a drive pulled off a desk by its own lead frequently starts ticking from that afternoon onwards. Cut the power now. For as long as current reaches it, a head that has lost its bearings is machining away the surface that holds your files, and none of that comes back.
Desktop boxes fail at the power stage far more often than on the platters. A drive that spins up, clicks once and goes quiet, or that cycles endlessly, is usually being starved rather than mechanically finished. A generic adaptor that happened to fit the socket is a common and expensive cause, because a supply that sags at spin-up leaves writes half finished month after month.
Twenty good minutes and then an hour of nothing means one of two things: sectors the drive can no longer read cleanly, or a shingled model rewriting whole bands in the background. Dragging folders across in Explorer is the worst available response to either, because it retries indefinitely and cooks the drive while it does.
A four-bay unit reports a member missing, and the disk itself turns out to read perfectly on a bench. Consumer disks retry a difficult sector for as long as a minute; NAS and recorder ranges are built to give up quickly and let the box deal with it. Put the wrong range in the wrong machine and a healthy drive gets thrown out of the set. That is array work from £500 + VAT rather than a single-drive job.
The drive reports its correct size and the computer offers to initialise it. That is a volume header or a partition table problem in the great majority of cases, and not one file has moved yet. Decline the offer, unplug it, and keep repair utilities away — the drive that becomes a hard job is the one somebody let Windows initialise.
Follow the Ultrastar line backwards and it leaves Western Digital in 2012, spends a decade as HGST, and before that is Hitachi, which bought IBM's disk business at the start of the century. People still ring asking for Hitachi recovery or IBM recovery as though either were a separate craft. It is not. Same spares racks, same firmware families, same head architecture, same bench, same £300 + VAT for a single disk.
What the lineage does change is supply, and supply is the only thing about an old drive that ever really matters. A mechanical repair needs a donor matched by model and firmware revision, not by the capacity printed on the front, and that match gets harder to find each year a line stays out of production. Deskstar desktop disks and Travelstar notebook mechanisms of the 7K generations are still perfectly workable because parts for them were bought and shelved while they were plentiful. A drive with nothing left to match it against is not impossible, it is a waiting job — which is the practical argument for sending an ageing disk in the week it starts to falter rather than in the year somebody finally gets round to it.
Ultrastars themselves rarely arrive alone. They come out of rack shelves and small servers, often on SAS rather than SATA, with hour counts in six figures and, where the seal has held, they image beautifully. A complete set is a reconstruction rather than a read, priced from £500 + VAT on the number of members, and the two facts worth writing down before anything is unracked are the bay order and what the controller was doing at the moment it stopped. The high-capacity models are sealed with helium instead of air, which is why they are opened in a controlled environment and never on a bench in an office. If yours is one disk on its own, HDD recovery and hard drive repair cover the mechanical route in full.
The colours are engineering intent rather than packaging, and knowing which one you are holding tells the bench a good deal about the life it has led and which band it lands in. Two of these ranges are worth reading carefully, because their quirks decide how much time you have.
The volume seller: family towers, budget builds and the notebook disks in laptops of a certain age. Sound enough in ordinary service. The catch is that several widely sold sizes, the 1TB and 2TB 2.5-inch models among them, overlap their write tracks to fit more on. Those image slowly, dislike sustained writing, and start a countdown when something is deleted. More single-drive work here carries this label than any other.
The performance line: faster spindles, conventional tracks, a longer warranty, and buyers who push them. Blacks run warm and are worked hard, and they tend to stop abruptly instead of declining politely. That usually means heads or bearings, which means filtered air, a matched stack, and half the figure settled in advance.
Built for boxes that never switch off, and the naming split matters. Plain Reds were shipped for a while with overlapping tracks, which caused a great deal of anger among people rebuilding arrays, while Plus and Pro stayed conventional. A shingled member in a set that is trying to rebuild slows the job and worsens the odds at the same time.
Camera duty. Fitted inside DVR and NVR recorders, where the writing never really stops and the disk holds the only copy of whatever happened. Nothing else sold to consumers is worked this hard, and they generally reach the bench having simply run out of life. A disk pulled from a recorder is £400 + VAT, and recorder jobs are one of the four exclusions from no fix, no fee.
The rack end of the catalogue and the line that descends from HGST. These arrive out of cabinets, storage shelves and small business servers, very rarely one at a time. A complete set is array work from £500 + VAT according to how many members it holds. A lone survivor of a machine long since decommissioned is the ordinary £300 + VAT.
Green was the low-power range, folded into Blue years ago, and Green or early Blue notebook mechanisms are what tend to be found inside portable cases from that era. They spin slowly, run cool, and after a decade they usually decline in stages rather than stopping dead. That makes them the drives most worth acting on in the week the first symptom appears.
My Passport is the bus-powered pocket unit, My Book the mains-powered desktop tower, Elements and Easystore the plainer versions of both. What they have in common is that a case, a board and a mechanism have to be told apart before anything else can be said, and roughly half of what arrives turns out to be the two components in front of the disk rather than the disk itself. That is why the unit travels whole and sealed, and why a drive shucked at a kitchen table arrives with the most useful evidence already thrown away. The triage sequence is on an external drive that is not working, the enclosure and bridge detail on external drive recovery, and the mechanical side on external hard drive repair. All of it is one drive at £300 + VAT.
One limit belongs here rather than in a footnote. Where a drive was locked with a password in the manufacturer's own security software and nobody has the password, the volume stays shut. That is the encryption working, not a fault, and no laboratory in the country gets past it. Where a key or a password does exist, an encrypted volume is ordinary work in the £400 + VAT band; encrypted and BitLocker drives sets out where keys usually turn out to be hiding.
These are Linux machines with disks in them, and on the multi-bay models the volume is spread across those disks in software rather than sitting complete on any one of them. Pull a single disk, plug it into a Windows machine, and Windows will offer to initialise it — that offer is the most expensive click available in the whole situation. Refuse it, shut the box down, and send the unit as it stands. Pricing follows the array rules from £500 + VAT, and NAS recovery covers the reconstruction alongside Buffalo, Synology and QNAP.
A great deal of this badge is flash now: WD-branded SATA solid state drives, the SN-series blades sitting in most laptops sold in the past few years, and everything SanDisk has produced since the two companies merged. All of it belongs on the flash bench at £300 + VAT, with NVMe at the same figure, while SanDisk cards and sticks are £250 + VAT. The limit deserves saying at the front rather than in a footnote. Remove a file from a solid state drive that is otherwise working and the contents are usually destroyed rather than concealed, because the drive wipes blocks it has been told are free within minutes of the machine falling quiet. Oddly, a solid state drive that has stopped answering altogether tends to offer better odds than one still in service, which is the opposite of what people expect when they ring.
Every job under this badge opens the same way. The drive is logged in, put on equipment designed for hardware that answers back unpredictably, and a report follows on the second working day. It settles three things and then stops: which layer has gone, how much of the surface can honestly be read, and what the work is worth. Only at that point does a number appear. It is written down and it does not move. Nothing before it is chargeable, and where the sensible advice is to leave the job alone, the report gives that advice instead of a quotation.
A logical fault — a deletion, a format, a mangled file table, a partition that stopped appearing — is worked entirely on a copy, so the drive itself is read through once and then left in a drawer. A mechanical fault means the disk is opened in filtered air, given a head stack matched to it, and asked for a single supervised pass rather than being run until it dies for good. Results are written to fresh media. Your original comes home or is destroyed under instruction, whichever you put in writing.
Two minutes on the freephone beats a fortnight of hoping. Anything overwritten is destroyed rather than hidden: a full format, a new copy of Windows on the same volume, or a few weeks of ordinary use after the files went missing all put fresh data exactly where the search would have gone. An overlapped-track disk formatted last month and left plugged in has been reusing those bands ever since. A drive that has already been opened somewhere other than a clean-air bench has usually taken in the dust that ends it. Flash soldered to a mainboard cannot be lifted off, so there is nothing to put in a parcel. And nothing with a touchscreen is accepted — no phones, no tablets, in any condition.
One disk or one solid state drive is £300 + VAT, NVMe blades at the same figure, and an external counts as a single drive no matter what its shell is made of. A card, a USB stick or a pen drive is £250 + VAT. A recorder disk is £400 + VAT, as is an encrypted volume where the key still exists. Several disks behind one badge is array work opening at £500 + VAT and rising with the member count. Logical jobs carry no fix, no fee. Four things sit outside it — electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs — and each takes half the quoted figure before the bench starts, because donor parts get bought for one named drive rather than kept in stock for drives in general. Approve a figure and a single-drive job is usually done inside 2 to 4 working days. Turn it down and the return postage is your entire cost. The price page sets out all five bands with VAT on its own line.
The bench is at Oxford Science Park, about fifty-five miles from Coventry down the M40 and an hour on an ordinary morning if you would rather deliver it; reception signs devices in Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Most of this work still comes by post — a Blue out of a tower in Tile Hill, a Purple lifted from a recorder above a shop on the Foleshill Road, Reds from a four-bay box in a Leamington studio, Ultrastars off a rack at Ansty. Coventry has no counter and nobody in this network collects, so a tracked parcel really is the quickest route. If the lid says Seagate, that page explains what changes.
Every other badge, on the same single-disk band.
Heads, boards and firmware on the mechanical bench.
Portables, desktop towers and the boards in front of them.
The checks worth running before anything is posted.
Most of the WD drives that arrive beyond help were left running while somebody decided what to do. Leave it off and in one piece, and let the free examination name the layer that gave way.
Branded drives reach this bench in the post far more often than by hand. A padded, tracked, insured parcel is a gentler ride for hardware that has already stopped behaving than a footwell on the ring road, and it costs a few pounds. If you would rather deliver it, Coventry to Oxford is about fifty-five miles of M40 and roughly an hour; posted on a Tuesday, a drive is normally logged in on the Wednesday.
Two shapes of drive, two different instructions. A disk unbolted from a tower, a laptop or a recorder travels on its own — the machine stays with you, nothing is dismantled at this end, and any repair shop in the city will free a drive in a few minutes. An external unit in its own case is the opposite: it travels whole and sealed, screws untouched, because the board in front of the disk is one of the things being tested. A NAS goes as a complete box with its disks in their bays, while a RAID set or a server sends its member disks only, each marked with the bay it came out of. Storage soldered flat to a mainboard is the one situation with no way round it, and there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. Driving it down is perfectly reasonable — fifty-five miles of M40 out of Coventry, an hour on a normal morning, parking at the door. However it arrives, you hear from the bench on the day it is logged, and the written figure lands two working days later.
Unsure which of those two shapes yours counts as? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal the box, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.