The drive which held the backup is frequently the one to fail. External drives can fall from a table, be knocked mid-transfer, or simply stop showing up. When you need us to recover an external hard drive, this is the lab that will do it, for all brands, every week.
A free diagnostic assessment is provided for every external drive job. A single fixed quotation is given in writing before any work has been done.
In the majority of cases, you only pay if we recover your data. We charge 50% upfront for electronic, mechanical and chip-level work, with the remaining 50% due only if we recover your data. Any job involving BitLocker, ransomware, forensic or CCTV/DVR work is paid in full upfront once you accept the fixed quote. A full price list can be found on the data recovery cost page.
Every external drive job is assessed by matching the symptoms to the fault, and these ten faults account for nearly all the external drive failures that reach the bench.
This is the typical way an external drive dies: impacts result in head crashes, and each additional attempt to read from the drive poses a greater risk to the platters.
Failure of the USB bridge, electronics or firmware; the drive is still alive but unable to communicate.
When a cable is yanked from the drive while writing, or the write process is interrupted, file system errors are created and the files are hidden beneath those errors.
The drive tries to spin, but stiction or a seized motor prevents it from doing so. Stop powering the drive immediately.
With dead electronics or a failed bridge, the drive is imaged through or around the original interface board.
My Passport and Elements drives encrypt files invisibly. If the original board fails, the data is not lost; however, if someone swaps the drive into a new enclosure themselves, they will encounter gibberish.
My Book style drives fail with their power bricks. More often than not this is the least expensive problem we encounter with them, although it can also be one of the messiest.
Bad sectors spread across the platters, and hardware imagers read around them before they spread further and it becomes too late to recover.
In most cases, data is fully recoverable if the drive stops being used immediately.
Platters are much more durable than most people realise. They are treated, transplanted and then imaged on the head-swap bench.
With their use in all areas of life, carried about in bags, knocked off desks and unplugged mid-write, external drives have a hard time. The most common way you'll end up losing your data is when one of them is dropped while it's spinning. This causes the heads to hit the platters, and the drive starts to click. All brands of external hard drives, including WD My Passport and Elements, Seagate Expansion and Backup Plus, LaCie, Buffalo, Toshiba Canvio and every other brand, get recovered, along with models that include an encrypted board and those with USB connectors soldered onto the board, which can't simply be swapped into another enclosure. That's just how we work: recovering data from external HDDs is core work for us, not a sideline. Whatever the name on the outside of the device, there is always a hard drive inside of it, and our full drive bench is behind it.
One of the main issues with recovery from modern portable drives is the encryption of the user's data at the hardware level. This happens without the user's knowledge, with the USB bridge board as part of the lock. Therefore, when a user removes the disk from the device and connects it directly to their PC using a SATA connection, they will only see unreadable gibberish. Many DIY users panic at this point. This is entirely normal to us. In fact, recovering through or around the original bridge board is something that we routinely perform, and therefore your files will be returned exactly as they were before your disaster.
External drives are hard drives wearing a jacket. As such, the full drive bench applies, as well as bridge-specific equipment:
This is the industry-standard firmware bench: it communicates with drives in manufacturer service mode in order to repair translators, remap defective sectors and unlock service areas.
Sector-by-sector imaging of unstable drives, using per-head control, current monitoring and automatic retry strategies that no software-based imager can match.
Our dedicated head-swap bench for open-drive work: all head swaps and platter handling take place here, never on an open desk.
Precision combs and lifters, used to exchange head stacks and migrate platter packs into donor chassis without causing contact damage.
Thousands of matched donor drives, indexed by model number, firmware family and site code, so when a faulty head stack or PCB needs replacing, the correct unit is typically already on the shelf.
Original-bridge imaging and decryption for WD's hardware-encrypted portables and other SED enclosures.
Failed interface boards are matched from stock so encrypted drives keep their key chain intact.
Portable SSDs (T5/T7, SanDisk Extreme) are a growing share of what we see: the insides are different, but they get the same free diagnostic.
LaCie has established itself in both the portable and desktop markets with products designed for travelling. Their Rugged portable storage products go into camera bags. Their d2 desktop products sit underneath edit suites. And their Porsche Design products sit on top of studio shelves. Travel is literally what kills these devices. If a camera bag is put down too hard while the platters are still spinning, it will damage the heads on a Rugged. Likewise, instead of damaging the disk itself, a d2 or Porsche Design product will generally lose its Thunderbolt or USB-C bridge electronics. Since LaCie was acquired by Seagate, there is now virtually no vendor repair route for a failed LaCie. So either you take it to a data recovery lab like ours or it dies and remains dead. Every single week, we receive these units from photographers and video editors throughout South Yorkshire. We open the case, image the bare drive (installing donor heads first if the impact calls for it) and recover their project files from the image.
The issue with a My Passport or Elements is that it is not a bare drive in a box, so it cannot simply be placed into another external case (caddy). WD solders the USB connector directly onto the drive's own controller board and uses that same board to handle the hardware encryption of your data. When the electronics fail, the files are locked away behind them, and if you were to take the disk and place it into a separate caddy, all you would see is unreadable noise. We keep matched donor boards in stock and carry the original encryption chain across intact, which is what turns an "undetected" Passport back into a set of readable folders. The mains-powered My Book desktop units add failure points of their own (a dead power brick, a burnt bridge board), yet usually still contain a perfectly healthy drive inside, just sitting there silently.
Buffalo's MiniStation portable units generally experience the same issues as other 2.5-inch portable drives: drops, bent USB connectors and slowly increasing numbers of bad sectors. The mains-powered DriveStation desktop units will often outlive their own PSUs and interface boards. Some MiniStation models employ hardware encryption, which we work through with your password so the files come back readable rather than scrambled. Regardless of the model received, we open the outer casing, image the drive sector by sector, and then proceed as with a normal drive recovery.
Our customers get a quote before sending their media to us, either by telephone on 0800 689 0668 or by completing our free online diagnostic. Once a customer has their quote, they post their media to us, tracked and insured.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from your machine and send us just the drive; we do not offer an internal drive-removal service. If you have a server or RAID system, please send us every disk, each clearly labelled with its bay. We cannot recover data from storage that is soldered directly onto the motherboard (for example Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), so we need removable drives to be sent to us. If you are unsure which kind you have, ring us first.
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