External WD Hard Disk Drive R.I.P?

peanutismint · 7 Nov 2007 at 11:03

balls said:
My seagate 7200.10 dropped 2m, onto a hardwood floor... still working in raid0 now.. thats shock tollerance ;p

Hahah I'll say!

Wish I had your luck mate! I wouldn't feel quite so bad about it, except for the fact that it's not my HDD, so I feel an obligation to put things right.

Morthoseth said:
They were just trying to help mate, thats one great thing about these forums, everyone has past experiences in different things, basmic simply wrote like that because of the 'gung-ho' attitude you started off with in the thread.

Perhaps it wouldnt save you money going to a professional, but it would save you the hassle of both them saying i told you so, and save yourself the hassle of losing all of your data and having to buy a new drive anyway

Yeah, I know, I'm sorry I came off as a bit gung-ho, I just didn't really want to face up to the fact that a momentary lapse in concentration had probably cost me about £2-300, money which I don't have. But hey, maybe that's what credit cards are for?!

paradigm · 7 Nov 2007 at 11:11

peanutismint said:
Yeah, I know, I'm sorry I came off as a bit gung-ho, I just didn't really want to face up to the fact that a momentary lapse in concentration had probably cost me about £2-300, money which I don't have. But hey, maybe that's what credit cards are for?!

£200-300 is cheap for data recovery, last HDD we sent off from here at work was more like £1000

peanutismint · 7 Nov 2007 at 11:17

paradigm said:
£200-300 is cheap for data recovery, last HDD we sent off from here at work was more like £1000

Yeah, but that's just it, some places charge what I like to call 'corporate' prices, and fair play, they probably do it very professionally, but there are places that do it just as well but charge 'sensible' prices, like home data recovery specialists. I guess it's coz they know that no home user in their right mind values their data at over about £300. A guy I've used before even offered to knock some money off if he could keep any good bits of my music collection he found! Sounds dodgy, but he did a really great job replacing a PCB and the drive is good as new!

peanutismint · 7 Nov 2007 at 11:59

p.s. for people who have been following this thread, I just happened to have stumbled across a related blog post in one of my syndicated sites, 'Vintage Computing And Gaming':

How Not to Dismantle a Hard Drive

What ever happened to good ‘ole fashioned aluminum discs? Thanks to a particularly rash and forceful extrication technique, I managed to spray bits of shattered, data-covered glass over half of my garage. Luckily, the pieces weren’t very sharp, as manufacturers apparently mix in some ceramic for good measure....

Read the full story

Yeah, looks like I won't be attempting this in my hyperbaric chamber after all....

basmic · 7 Nov 2007 at 12:02

peanutismint, if I came across as harsh or bitter - then I make no apologies. It was for your own good.

If people thought they could just change harddrive heads in their own house, then there would be probably be fewer RMAs to harddrive companies. All I wanted to do, was plant into your head that you would likely fail when attempting to replace the head - lessening the chances of your data recovery.

Oh, and for the record, NEVER EVER unscrew the platters. If you move them by so much as a fraction of a hair, then you might as well kiss the drive goodbye!

When you dropped your drive, the heads probably scraped on the platter. By doing this, there could be metallic dust inside the drive now. If you want the data recovering, you really need to stop tinkering with the drive, and send it to somebody who knows what they're doing.