Hi Vanguard.
On 2018-04-21 10:26, VanguardLH wrote:
B00ze wrote:
Got a 15 years old WD IDE hard drive, that was showing ZERO problems in
SMART data, suddenly can no longer calibrate (i.e. it can't read
anymore.) NOW the SMART data is showing something's wrong. Hard drive
"clicks" (heads go back and forth full disk) then quits trying. Have
another of the same model, but hesitant moving the platters myself;
apparently platters are not really "stuck" together and I could
mis-align them (rotate them in relation to each other) rendering the
whole thing un-readable. Was planning to move the data off but kept
delaying since it showed no sign of problems...
Now need a data recovery company; anyone have good experience with one
and can recommend?
How much are you willing to spend? Could be a few hundred dollars or a
couple thousand depending on whether advanced (expensive) software could
be used or they have to disassemble the drive in a clean room and use
special equipment to read the magnetic dipoles from the platters.
Max I'm paying is $500 Canadian. If they try to charge me $1500-$2000,
I'm doing it myself.
When my aunt found out it would cost $1500 to recover old data files
from her defective HDD, she decided that old data wasn't really worth
that much. Also, it is highly unlikely that they can recover 100% of
the data from the platters. With luck being against you, likely the
majority of the files you want to recover will be unrecoverable.
It's not damaged because I had a fire or because the heads crashed into
the platters and left nice circular traces into it. I suspect something
like one of the heads just doesn't work anymore, nothing more than that.
Recovery should be fairly simple. It was working fine on 100% of its
surface in the morning, couldn't calibrate when I came home from work. I
think it's just age - something failed, and it's not the spindle motor,
and I don't think it's the actuator/voice-coil that drives the heads,
since they still move back and forth.
nospam mentioned DriveSavers. They seem to be about what was estimated
to rescue data from my aunt's HDD and the company name sounds familiar.
Yeah, we'll see; that dude in your link paid them $1900, no way I'm
paying that. I have an exact same drive/model they can use for parts, if
they can't be reasonable I'm not playing.
https://www.geek.com/chips/drivesave...-drive-574764/
"Pricing is determined by the drive capacity, complexity and
completeness of the data recovery. The cost for recovering data from a
drive with severe media damage, like mine, is about $1900. An average
single drive data recovery costs about $1500."
https://acsdata.com/drivesavers-data-recovery/
That has ACS extolling DriveSavers, a competitor.
ACS has an interesting video of how to move platters from one drive to
another:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZx-tU1_gOw
Considering the how expensive it is to use physical recovery services, I
find regular scheduled backups (which eliminates user intervention since
humans are unreliable in saving backups at critical moments in change of
state to their drives) to other internal media (for fast restores) and a
2nd copy of offline media to be far cheaper and the shortest time to
recover.
Yeah, I'm more careful now (duplication and SnapRAID) but that computer
with the failed drive was old, and I kept reporting copying the files
over the network (slow) to later. Shoulda taken the time to do it lol.
Can you find a seller of the same type (IDE) of drive at the same
capacity (or a minimum size that would encompass the data files you
think are on the failed drive)? The rescue service provider might get
some of the data files off the failed drive but they may not be able to
put them back on the same type and size of drive you had. How accurate
is your measure of 15 years old for the failed drive? Up until
somewhere to the 80's, MFM was used. That got replaced by RLL by the
early 90's. Then came PATA and SATA (and some others). Since you
mentioned IDE, yours is using PATA which was called ATA or [E]IDE before
SATA came out.
It's not so old as to use MFM or RLL; it probably uses PRML. It's a PATA
drive, it does PATA-100 if I recall, interface-side - i.e. it uses the
80-wires cables. I don't really need another drive, once I have the data
the old computer goes to recycling. I'm keeping the computer now in case
I want to do recovery myself and need it to read back the drive.
Regards,
--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Member
avid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo Sex is not the answer, it's the question. Yes is the answer.