Portable drives · job notes · NTG-2025-1469
Six Weeks of Getting Slower, and Then Nothing.
Six weeks, start to finish. The dealer takes a unit at the Newark-on-Trent fairs, and his drive gave way by degrees: first it took a minute to come up, then it took five
, then you click a folder and it is just the spinning wheel
, and finally the lamp comes on and there is nothing after that
. On it was the whole business — years of stock photography, the inventory database, the condition notes, and valuation images of pieces sold long ago and photographed nowhere else. Somebody once told him to defragment it. He never did, and that is the luckiest thing in this file.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
Nothing in that case is seizing up with age. What you are watching is arithmetic. One retry on a sector is invisible to you; fifty retries take real seconds off the clock, and the total climbs as the weak region spreads. Thumbnails give it away first, because drawing one means pulling a whole file up through all those retries. So the disk is not slow. It is being asked once and replying on the tenth or the fiftieth go. The morning nothing appeared at all was that same sum done on mounting: a machine and a drive have to come to an agreement before any volume reaches the screen, and their conversation had begun taking longer than the machine was prepared to wait.
The bench work this one took.
How the work runs →| Kit on the bench | What it did on this job | Why we reach for it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | The hard passes ran over SATA, timeouts set to what the failing head could manage | One platter side per pass, with the heads mapped before a single sector is taken off, and the resets, the timeouts and the power all held under our control |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | First pass went through the bridge board inside the enclosure, no operating system in the path | Reads through the enclosure's own USB board at full speed, rather than round it |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Folder tree rebuilt out of the images, then written across to a replacement disk | Reads APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs where other tools give up |
What happened on the bench.
Measure it before you open it
A failing drive holds a fixed number of reads and no more; spend one satisfying curiosity and it is gone permanently. Nothing was opened when it arrived, therefore; measurement came first. Reallocations were high and had not stopped rising, and a head-by-head survey then found what mattered: one of the four answered late, and later still on each pass after that. Its zone was precisely the ground on which his previews had been failing.
Clear the healthy areas while they are still healthy
What decided the order of work was confidence, not sector numbers. Three heads were dependable, ran at full rate and had their zones clear inside a working day. That put the archive largely out of the fault's way while the drive was still willing. Only after that did the restraints come off — timeouts lengthened, resets run under supervision — and the region responsible for those six weeks got its turn.
The slow head last, then a rebuild onto fresh media
Territory belonging to the slow head came last, and it gave ground grudgingly: a halt, a pause, a power cycle, another go. Whatever came out went onto a new disk, laid out in the folders the archive had used from the start, so his cataloguing picks up where it stopped.
What was returned.
Very little is missing. Back came the inventory database, back came the condition notes, and nearly all of the stock photography with them. One batch from the earliest sessions lay in the failing head's ground: part of it came back damaged and part of it did not come back, with each item named in the report. The sale catalogues can be shot a second time; their printed copies are on the shelf behind his counter. Valuation images cannot be, since those pieces went off with their buyers years ago.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
More portable-drive jobs on the log.
Sounds like yours? Switch it off before anything else.
£250 + VAT covers a card or a USB stick; a single drive is £300 + VAT; RAID and NAS start from £500 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the first look, and a fixed figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work begins. Switch the device off, leave it alone, and post it in. On most jobs, no data back means no fee.