IBM was the company that invented the hard drive more than fifty years ago, and their disks are normally reliable. However their DeskStar hard drives have an disturbing reputation for serious mechanical failure – the most notorious of which is known as the DeskStar “Click of Death”. This type of fault is identified by a regular scratching noise interrupted by a click sound that comes from the hard drive. Click of Death problems are among the most burdensome to recover data from, and we urgently recommend that you speak to one of our recovery technicians as soon as you suspect that your drive may be about to fail.

Fujitsu hard drives don’t often fail, but a few years ago they admitted to have released some five million hard drives that had a defective chip. When failure occurs for this or some other physical reason, recovery is possible and the time it takes will normally depend on the availability of spare parts. There are thousands of different hard drives on the market and it is not possible to stock spares for all of them. Logical data recovery occurs when there is nothing physically wrong with the hard drive but the data on it is either corrupted or a partition or sector is damaged. In such cases recovery is possible but can take a lot of painstaking work

Like other hard drives, Western Digital sometimes fail. An example of this type of malfunction could be because of the failure of the read/write head causing the drive to crash, or of an electrical spoke causing a burn out on a circuit board. Repair to this type of breakdown will depend on the availability of spare parts. Breakdown could also be logical – the drives S.M.A.R.T. system may have become corrupt causing the drive to fail, or it could be a track directory failure where the disk cannot recall the positioning of the data tracks and so is unable to access the data on the drive. In such a case we will try to repair the disk electronically.

Seagate hard drives can fail just as easily as any other, and recovery will depend on the nature of the failure. When there is a physical failure (this can be a broken part, a burned out motor or circuit board) repair will depend entirely on the time it takes to source a replacement for the damaged part. If we have the part in stock we’re looking at a week of longer. A logical Seagate hard drive recovery is a usually a little easier but can also be time consuming, as we may have to literally go through all of the data on the drive bit by bit.

Any hard drive can fail, Maxtor included, and when one does it can be put down to one of two reasons, and this can determine what type of hard drive recovery is carried out. You could be looking at a logical hard drive recovery, and this is carried out when there is no physical damage to the Maxtor hard drive. This will involve a scan of the hard drive and either electronic repair to the partition, which can be a relatively simple affair. Damaged or corrupt files will take longer as this involves a painstaking search of all of the Maxtor hard drive – the chances of recovery are good in most cases. If the drive is physically damaged repair may take longer simply because of sourcing the damaged part or circuit board. In such cases repair could take a week or longer.