Although drives such as Hitachi, HGST, IBM and WD Ultrastar may have similar characteristics, they were often designed in different generations. This generation determines whether there is compatibility between your failed drive and our donors, and that decides whether a mechanical recovery is possible at all.
It was in 2003 that IBM divested itself of its disk drive manufacturing business to Hitachi, followed by Hitachi becoming HGST and Western Digital (WD) acquiring HGST in 2012. Regardless of these changes, each family has continued to exist in some form during all of this, and it is the reason why we are able to match your drive to a compatible donor, but also why this process is so fussy.
In 2003 Hitachi bought IBM’s storage arm, and got both the desktop Deskstars and the enterprise Ultrastars. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was renamed HGST and WD purchased it in 2012. Therefore today WD’s Ultrastar units descend directly from IBM designs. As far as recovering goes, understanding these product lines is useful and not useless; you need to find the right donor unit (which has the correct heads, firmware etc. and was possibly even manufactured during the same year). The same hardware can have been sold under three different names over its years.
The old nickname for the Deskstar line was a product of a known reliability issue two decades back. We continue to get in those older units, so at this point age is the major contributing factor regardless of how they were built originally.
As we have previously said, head-stack failures are among the most common mechanical issues. A drive will exhibit its failure as a repeating ‘click’ since the heads cannot locate their servo data. With a clicking Hitachi drive, there is a greater chance you have failed heads rather than heads stuck to the platter (which is good news for the platter) but not good news if you try to turn it on.
Faults in service areas appear as a spinning disk where you expect your data to reside; however, your disk displays incorrect information (wrong size) or displays no information at all, and these types of faults fall into the category of less severe failures. Due to their unique design (they are helium filled and sealed), modern high-capacity Ultrastar hard disk drives offer a different perspective. When one of these sealed systems is damaged, you must assume that the internal environment of the system has been compromised. These should be treated differently than other failed hard disk drives. If you open up a helium filled drive once, it will not operate reliably again; therefore, we image your failing drive in a single pass during our initial recovery process.
In order to repair a faulty head stack, we need a compatible head-stack donor unit. The new head-stack donor unit must possess the same head configurations and pre-amp characteristics as the original unit’s head-stack and also belong to the same family of firmware so that the “adaptives” may be carried over from the original unit to the replacement unit. Because two identical models of hard disk drives (i.e., same model #, same capacity) may have different numbers of heads and revisions internally due to differences in manufacture date, this is typically the most difficult task associated with repairing a faulty head stack. It is this difficulty finding matching units that many times makes the sourcing portion of the project slower than the actual labour involved in performing the repairs themselves. As older Deskstar units become increasingly obsolete, availability of suitable donor units becomes more limited, further emphasising the importance of not leaving an old drive plugged in and hoping it will magically recover itself.
For a standalone Hitachi or HGST drive we charge from £300 +VAT. However, when using the drive as part of a NAS, server or RAID system our costs start at £500 +VAT. We provide a free diagnostic (within 48 hours) and prior to starting any work we will provide a fixed, formal written quotation. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For all donor/replacement parts we require a 50% advance deposit with the remaining amount payable only on successful recovery.
In effect, yes. Hitachi purchased IBM’s storage division (which included its hard disk drive manufacturing) in 2003. The new company that formed as a result of this purchase was named HGST. Then, in 2012 Western Digital purchased HGST. Therefore, the current WD Ultrastar drives have an unbroken lineage from when they were Hitachi. This is important for data recovery purposes because you need matching hardware and firmware within the same product family for donor parts.
Most likely a failed head stack. The heads in these families sit on a parking ramp instead of on the platter surface. So if your heads are damaged, you’re going to hear clicking. Shut down power immediately to prevent further damage; each additional rotation after that will drag the already-damaged sliders across the recordable surface.
Yes; however, there’s one catch here. These drives are hermetically sealed. Once the seal has been broken, the internal environment can never be restored to normal and the disk will not function reliably anymore. As such, we plan our work to include only one controlled image attempt.
Due to head configuration, pre-amp characteristics and firmware adaptive configurations needing to be aligned. Although two identical models with the same capacity will share the exact same model numbers, there could still exist differences in the head counts and internal revisions depending upon when each was built. Therefore, finding the correct donor unit is typically the slowest process involved in a mechanical recovery.
From £300 + VAT per unit for a Hitachi or HGST drive alone and from £500 + VAT as part of a NAS, RAID or server. A fixed price in writing, based on a free 48-hour diagnostic, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.