The fault · knocks and falls
With the platters turning, the head rides nanometres above the surface at 5,400 or 7,200rpm, with no slack anywhere for a jolt. Powered down, the same drive is far tougher than people assume: the heads sit parked off to one side and the whole assembly will absorb a serious landing. Running or parked shapes almost everything that follows, on every dropped drive that reaches us in Cardiff. Which is why the one thing not to do is plug it in and find out. That first spin-up is often the best read the disk has left, and a pointless test uses it up.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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| Warning signs | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| Clicking ever since the drop | Shock has moved the heads out of alignment and it retries endlessly | Keep the power off |
| A beep since the knock | The spindle cannot turn — heads lying flat on the surface, or a bearing that has seized | Never shake it loose |
| It has gone from the computer | Heads down, a spindle motor that will not turn, or damage to the board or socket | Inspect it, do not retry it |
| Fine at first, going downhill | Light damage that worsens each hour it is used | Move now, while it responds |
| An SSD or memory stick dead after a fall | No moving parts to fail — look to the board, a joint or a connector | Board-level repair work |
The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.
No current goes near it until an engineer has been over it, because after a drop a bent head meets the platter on the very first rotation. Where it is spun, it is spun once, under observation.
Ruined head stacks are swapped for matched donors, jammed spindles are freed off, heads resting on the platter are eased away, boards and ports mended.
Whatever reads without trouble is copied off and stored safely first. Only afterwards does the engineer go back for the sectors the impact wrecked.
Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.
The figures on the datasheets: a 2.5" notebook mechanism is typically quoted at around ~300G in operation and roughly ~650G parked, whereas some 3.5" desktop drives are listed as low as ~30G with the platters spinning. Switching off before you move a machine costs you nothing, and no other precaution here helps as much.
The drive went down onto concrete as a wedding shoot was packing up, and the first bench test had it clicking. Three years of paid commissions were on there. A donor head stack, two days of imaging, and every gallery came home — that morning's included.
Usually, so long as nothing has been tried on it already. The mechanism is not being saved for further service — it has to survive one careful read and no more. With a donor head stack and a slow image, the bulk of the disk generally comes back.
It matters a great deal — far more than the same fall with the power off. A head riding nanometres above a turning platter has nowhere to escape to, and it can score the surface. Leave it off.
Rarely much. There are no moving parts to wreck, so what breaks is the board, a connector snapped off, or a solder joint that has parted. All of that is bench electronics, and the flash chips your files live on are usually untouched.
Almost certainly. A head or a bearing knocked a fraction out of line degrades a little more with each spin-up, so the drop settled the outcome and every start since has simply hurried it along.
A failing drive has only so many starts left in it. Spend none of them. Keep the power off, and the free diagnosis will tell you what is still readable.