External data storage has become the preferred method with home users and small businesses to back up vital data. People who use computers at home have more data than ever before, and most find their storage needs are not sufficient. Users are turning to external storage to quench their thirst for extra storage, which means more hard drive failures. We have listed below the common physical problems that can cause external hard drives to fail:
Hard drive being dropped or knocked over.
The highest level of skill is required to replace damaged heads – without damaging something else in the process. The heads are connected via suspensions and arms to an E-block that has bearings in its hub. This assembly, with a portion of the voice-coil motor actuator, is called the head stack. When heads are replaced, it is easiest to replace the entire head stack. This is also referred to as a head transplant.
As we come to the end of the year, 2010 is going to be the age of multi-terabyte storage, with many manufacturers introducing 2TB hard drives. But how reliable will they be?
A new manufacturing process that will put 640GB on a single HDD platter, has allowed manufacturers to dramatically increase storage capacities drastically. As the 3.5-inch drives used in desktop PCs typically hold four or five platters, that suggests a whopping 3.2TB hard disk space of storage on a single drive. Looking at the likely timing, the new manufacturing technology could put the giant drives in shops as early as February next year.
Hard Drive Physical Components
The hard drive itself consists of two main parts.
The mechanical part including the heads and disk assembly.
The PCB electronic board.
As these parts are physical they can be subject to failure and result in the need for hard drive data recovery.
The PCB is made from different components, each chip, resistor, fuse etc all have their own tasks and duties. Later in the week we will discuss the PCB more in depth. At this stage you should be aware that as this is the electronic circuitry of the hard drive it is subject to electrical failures.
Inside the hard drive we can see many more physical components. See fig 1 for the view inside a hard drive.
Common Problems and Diagnostics of Seagate data recovery.
U Series 5
Typical problems with this drive family are diode failures which affect the voice coil and spindle, and failure of the read/write channel.
Barracuda ATA II
This family tends to suffer from problems with the stabilizers of the spindle motor circuit either by burning or shorting out. The latching transistors of the read/write channel circuitry, the symptoms of which are the drive produces knocking at a frequency of 5Hz.
I got a Samsung SP1654N IDE drive in today which at first glance looks like any other IDE hard drive. The biggest head scratch is that when slaved into a secondary system, the system powers up normally, all looks good. On closer inspection of our slaved drive reveals that the disk is not spinning, not even a brrrrr or click. Someone call a external drive data recovery specialist!
The drive came from a external hard drive casing. This was tested and we found it to be faulty as well. We can say that the drive suffered from a intense power spike. This spike has caused damage to the external hard drive casing, the PCB of the hard drive and also the spindle motor of the hard disk drive.
Western Digital P-List corruption causing drive failure
Background: Failures on WD hard disks can sometimes be attributed to a corruption of service data located in the firmware zone of the hard disk. This corruption often involves a table commonly known as the P-List and in many cases, it is impossible to read the original contents of the P-List once the drive has failed.
MVI Data Recovery has challenged Apple to come clean about what it claims is a “critical manufacturing flaw” affecting some hard drives used in MacBook laptops and desktops like the Mac Mini – an issue that could result in data loss and the need for HDD data recovery.
MVI Data’s customers have sent in a much higher numbers of failed Seagate 2.5in SATA drives made in China and loaded with firmware version 7.01 than of any other current hard drive model. We’re getting 20-30 times more failed drives of this kind than others.
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