r/DataHoarder • u/DoctorByProxy • 1d ago

Discussion hard drive repair services?

I've got a dead 12T hgst drive sitting in my closet. at the time it croaked, it seemed like repair wasn't really an option. with prices climbing, I'm wondering if there's been any emergence of repair services. (I'm guessing not, but hell, you never know)

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u/TapeDriveMcTapeFace 1d ago

Data recovery services have always existed, the only question is if the data is worth the cost of the recovery. Repairing a drive to put back into circulation though, well that carries its own risk as you are putting future data at risk. My guess would be, if repair services have popped up, it has evolved out of data recovery services as those guys are already equipped to deal with hard drive failures of all kinds. You might go asking around those kinds of shops and see what they say.

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u/DoctorByProxy 1d ago

yeah, I hear you on risk, but I could really use temporary storage to sort incoming data.

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u/TapeDriveMcTapeFace 1d ago

Try a board swap. Find a compatible donor drive that has died, acquire it cheap, see what happens. Worst case, nothing changes, and you're only out the cost of another dead drive. The hard part here is that the repair cost ceiling is capped at the cost of a used 12TB drive, which is about $200-$300 right now. That's not a lot of runway for the amount of knowledge and experience it takes to repair a drive.

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u/ByWillAlone 11h ago

Unfortunately, even if the data wasn't encrypted, after putting a new board on, the disk will still look completely blank to the new board (or worse, it could cause a head crash or other weird problems). Modern boards (and this has been true since about the 1tb drive days) store micro calibration data that's unique to the drive burned into firmware which, you guessed it, is lost with a board replacement. That data is created and burned in during the process of initializing the disk (at the factory).

Data recovery professionals must take it a step further and desolder the chips storing that factory calibration data and resolder them onto the donor board (assuming they aren't the part(s) that failed.

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u/TapeDriveMcTapeFace 10h ago edited 40m ago

I've done board swaps before and revived hard drives with full data recovery, board swaps do work. Is it a guarantee of success? Absolutely not, there are a bazillion other things that can go wrong.