Seagate hard drives are one of the most popular OEM devices today, so it’s no surprise that we see them almost every day in our data recovery lab. They are one of the most affordable brands for retail drives too, which adds to the number of Seagate data recovery cases we see each year. Over the years, there have been some high profile issues with different models of Seagate disk drives, but one of the most popular families of drives, known as “Grenada”, had a bad reputation in the beginning. When they were first introduced, many data recovery professionals had public discussions on forums about the difficulty of recovering these storage devices. Today, with updated software and hardware recovery tools and precision hand tools for head stack replacement, recovering a Seagate Grenada, or just about any Seagate DM series hard disk drive, is just another day at the office.
The most common issue we see is a drive that has started developing bad sectors (see why do hard drives fail?). Hard drives have built-in routines to cope with low numbers of expected media defects that can develop over time, but when the bad sectors exceed a certain threshold, the drive typically malfunctions and the user loses access to their data. This type of failure is easily handled by an experienced data recovery pro.
Another common reason for a drive to end up at our data recovery lab is damage from impact. Although failure from impact is less common for full size 3.5″ disk drives installed in desktop computers, these full size drives are used in external USB models too. Unlike the small portable external USB hard drives that get power from the USB port, the full size Seagate drives are not only larger, but they require an external power source. Also, many of these large external USB devices are designed so they can be placed on your desk standing up, which in my opinion is a terrible idea. If the drive tips over, the impact can be enough to cause media damage and, in some cases, head failure. That’s right, it doesn’t have to fall to the floor to get damaged.
If you have experienced a Seagate hard drive failure, we can help in most cases. At Blizzard Data Recovery, our flat-rate hard drive recovery rates are some of the lowest in the industry, but with a 95% recovery rate you aren’t sacrificing performance for price. So what makes up the other 5%, the unrecoverable cases? Most of those are drives that have suffered catastrophic failure, meaning the platter surfaces are almost completely destroyed, and the damage is visible without magnification. We declare these DOA cases. There are times when damage that makes the drive unrecoverable is only visible using magnification – the platter coating can be seen on the slider/head components under a microscope, and not all of those cases can be recovered by head cleaning or replacement.
Some of the models from the Grenada family of Seagate desktop models that we have recovered include:
ST1000DM003-1CH162
ST1000DM003-9YN162
ST1000DX001-1CM162
ST1000VM002-1CT162
ST1000VM002-9ZL162
ST1500DM003-9YN16G
ST2000DM001-1CH164
ST2000DM001-1ER164
ST2000DM001-9YN164
ST2000VX000-9YW164
ST3000DM001-1CH166
ST3000DM001-1ER166
ST3000DM001-9YN166
You can see more Seagate disk drive models here.