With cameras available to just about everyone all the time, most of us find ourselves needing more and more storage space for pictures and video. Sure, cloud storage is advertised almost everywhere now, but not everyone is ready to pay recurring fees to store their family photos, videos, and documents. That’s one reason spinning disk drives are still popular, it’s very cheap storage media.
Read: “Still Spinning After all These Years“.
With so many individuals and small businesses still relying on external and portable disk drives, it’s no wonder they make up a good percentage of data recovery cases. As long as Western Digital and Seagate keep increasing the capacity, we will continue to see external hard drives that need data recovery. It’s not so much that the devices have a high failure rate from “normal” use, the problem is that a spinning disk drive is a delicate instrument. I suspect that a large number of external hard drive users have no idea how easy it is to damage these devices, and I don’t see nearly enough warning from the manufacturers about how delicate they really are.
It doesn’t matter if you use a portable or a big desktop external disk drive for backups and file storage, there is a good chance you could end up with a failure and loss of data. Portable hard drives that get tossed in a backpack, briefcase, purse, laptop bag, or on the seat of your car are just a failure waiting to happen, it’s almost inevitable. Full size desktop models sometimes suffer from power failures, but it’s even more common to see burnt components because someone used the wrong power supply. Another reason the bigger drives fail is because they are heavier than the portable drives. They don’t even have to fall to the ground, just tipping them over on a desk while they are reading or writing data can damage them. Unfortunately, drive manufacturers seem to promote standing them up rather than leaving them lay flat.
If you have suffered an external hard drive failure, we can recover your data in most cases.
See: External Hard Drive Recovery Cost.
That said, you should never consider data recovery as your backup plan; it’s a lot more expensive than buying extra storage media and there is no guarantee. Sometimes a disk drive suffers a catastrophic failure that nobody can recover. Don’t believe everything you see on TV. 🙂
If you haven’t suffered a failure but you own a portable disk drive or external desktop model, you should consider backing it up while you still have access to your valuable data. Data loss can be devastating and the cost of spinning disk storage is just too cheap to leave your valuable data at risk.
Curious about what WD model is inside a Passport or Elements USB enclosure? Read our WD External USB to Internal Model Cross Reference article.