There are several factors that have an impact on the time and the cost of the data recovery process. For example, whether a drive has a logical problem, the magnetic head assembly is damaged, or another issue. It also often depends on the manufacturer’s brand.

Some HDD brands require more attention and a specific approach. One of them is the Seagate brand hard drive. 

Working with a physically and mechanically damaged Seagate drive requires more time and more patience.

Moreover, the recovery process of that brand usually demands the usage of several donor drives, making the process more time-consuming.

Seagate Freeplay Hard Drive

Seagate Freeplay hard drives continue to be in steady demand among the public. These devices provide their users with reliability and durability. Still, no hard drive can exist without any malfunctions.

Seagate Freeplay can have various problems that can become fatal and virtually incurable. Repairing a Seagate Freeplay hard drive is often more complicated than it seems. For example, breakage in the magnetic head unit, malfunction of the control controller (Seagate repair controller), spindle motor, damage to the disk surface, and others.

Without special equipment and tools, such problems cannot be solved. In such cases, repair of Seagate hard drives is better to trust professionals. 

Our Seagate Freeplay Case

Recently, we have been introduced to a Seagate Freeplay hard drive with physical damage. Our client mentioned that the drive made irrelevant to the media storage noises and did not open in the BIOS. One of our first suggestions was that the block of magnetic heads fell on the platters and scratched them. When the disc fails, it should be disconnected from the power supply so as not to exacerbate the damage. 

Specialists do not advise using programs to recover lost data in case of doubts about disk health. Such programs are designed to solve logical problems on fully functioning media. 

As a rule, they perform scanning procedures, which can be extremely harmful to a faulty disk, for example, if it has unreadable sectors or malfunctioning mechanics. And in some cases, the disk is not defined in the system, which means that any software for it is useless.

Moreover, using unverified tools on your failed device is very risky. Malware inserted on the drive can worsen the situation and make the files irrecoverable. 

Seagate Hard Drive Recovery Process

The client did the right thing and entrusted his drive to our engineers to solve the problem, making the recovery process less complex.

Data recovery experts did inspections to look at what was causing the drive to make strange sounds. 

They opened the drive in the ISO Certified Class 10 Cleanroom and saw a head crash, which happens when read/write heads contact the platter and slash their surface.  The most efficient way to fix this issue was to get the block of the magnetic head out of the surface of the platters.

The donor drive was needed to be able to recover all the data from the failed drive. Our engineers took read/write heads from the brand new one and replaced them in the failed media storage. Most of the data were recovered, but media stored in the scratched sectors were lost permanently. When the platters get scratched, the media containing that part will be lost forever. It is known as a catastrophic head crash.

The client immediately approved data recovery. One of the rare cases was when our engineers needed only one spare donor drive to read approximately 95% of all existing data by implementing the recovery process with a unique approach. After the client confirmed successful data recovery, all data was handed over. The customer was very satisfied with the results.