So...I dropped my portable hdd, yep it doesn't work. Any advice?

FlyingFish · 12 Jan 2023 at 19:43

Stupid rage moment at home, trying to yank out a USB charging cable from the cluttered mess in my draw, resulted in my portable (backup) hdd taking flight and crashing down onto the hard flooring a couple of meters away. :mad:

You guessed it, it will not spin up, just clicks.

What are my options? Anyone any experience with this?

My first thought was to crack it open and have a look, spin the ol motor up and get it going again... but a 5 second Google search told me that was a really bad idea, and you need to be a NASA engineer in the vacuum of space to go anywhere near it...

I'm off to get a drink now, and try not to think about the family photos that are on it.
Sob.

Hyburnate · 12 Jan 2023 at 19:52

Honestly... over to the experts.

Just don't touch it. If anything on it means something to you, let them sort it.

throwaway4372 · 12 Jan 2023 at 20:02

This is why you keep two copies of everything. One copy is not a backup.

Nemiyen · 12 Jan 2023 at 20:07

Definitely give it to the experts to recover. That clicking could be causing the heads to scratch the platters and causing permanent, non recoverable damage.

Hopefully it's just the arm that's got damaged and not the platters themselves but I wouldn't touch it if you care about what's on there.

FlyingFish · 12 Jan 2023 at 20:26

I did a quick search here on the topic before posting, and that came up with a 10yr old thread mentioning a cost up to £2k! Ouch.
I wonder if there's a jerry rig hdd episode

FlyingFish · 12 Jan 2023 at 22:03

What a stroke of luck....I just cant believe it...Turns out Suki the house cat is a HDD wizz technician....Amazing!

Armed with some basic tools it was'nt long before the HDD was cracked open and well on its way to the bin!

Turns out deeper grooves are a thing inside HDD's and it also looks like a funky 'head' component was jammed into the surface of the platter...No worries, a few cat paws later and the component was free.

New teeny tiny cat toy:

throwaway4372 said:
This is why you keep two copies of everything. One copy is not a backup.

So turns out (after going through my draw of swapped out drives) my own paranoia has backed up my files and photos to several HDD's not just this portable drive, thankfully. So this is a very important lesson learned....SSD all the way

I thought drives were supposed to be shock proof against drops, like laptops could detect when they are in free fall before hitting the floor?

Cyber-Mav · 13 Jan 2023 at 09:35

you could try soldering that part back on and see if it works.