A professional photographer with many weddings dropped his external hard drive, which was a Seagate 1TB, obviously he was extremely concerned, as was the bride and groom whom also had potentially ‘lost’ their precious day from that days shoot.
Upon receiving the faulty hard disk it was diagnosed with spindle seizure and HSA damage, both of which are serious failures the recovery would be very complex and would require many hours clean room work and other engineering duties.
The hard drive was not spinning at the time so this did limit the failure to a degree, if the storage device had been spinning then the HSA may have caused further damage to the disk surfaces or platters, this is due to the fact the the platters spin at 7200 rpm and the heads fly at a operational height of less than 1 micron, so the vertical displacement of torque or G’s to the disk only has to be minimal for it to come into contact with the disk surface causing damage.
This failure type was dealt with in the clean room and several techniques were employed, firstly the platters were transplanted to another known good chassis, this procedure is very complex, time consuming and requires specialist equipment, many companies can fail with this procedure, and here is why.
All hard drives are ‘synchronised’ platter to platter, that is to sat the the servo wedges, tracks and other vital areas are calibarated at the factory at the point of manufacture so any ‘slipping’ or moving of the rotational alignment could and very often does render the disk unusable, and more impertinently your data will not be accessible.
Following the platter transplant to a good known chasis with a good working motor, the HSA is the next part to be replaced, this also is not an easy procdure, it requires skill and dedication to source the correct parts and then install them in the new hard drive build.
Following the clean room the drive is then checked via the com port or TTL rs232 to USB port for firmware diagnosis, here a report of the hard drive firmware is diagnosed, if there are any issue here they are corrected and the drive is then taken to the image and cloning area to to cloned to a reliable destination.
The final part of the recovery is the file system reconstruction to its native format and a folder and file list sent to the client, a random amount of .jg, .raw.,tiff., nef files were launched as to check their integrity, all of which worked with no issues at all.
During the various stages of recovery the photographer was emailed and phoned with regular updates as to the progress and current position of the recovery, as he was very anxious to resolve this quickly, this we achieved in 5 days, to his immense relief.
Our advice if you accidentally drop or knock a hard drive, particulalry if the drive is on at the time please do not repower the drive as this will cause further issues and may compound the recovery at worst it may destroy your data.
If you are wedding photographer ensure that you have more than one back up in the filed so if you are using a Nikon and a Canon camera and have a decent size CF card, also it would be wise where time permits to backup to your hard drive and some other form of device such as an SD card, USB memory stick or similar, that way you should have a form of backup if your main drive fails.
