Desktop externals · case log · NTG-2025-1484
The Urgent Drive Was the Quiet One.
Closing the smaller of two offices is what finally put both drives in the post. A lettings and property management agency in Derby had fetched the Iomega down from a stationery cupboard so the archive could be copied one final time, and it would not see that copy through: Ten minutes or so into a folder and it disappears
. Everyone assumed the age of the thing
explained that, and nobody went any further. Newer, and kept on top of a filing cabinet right up until a removals trolley clipped it, the Seagate had behaved differently ever since — clicks, and clicks, and that is the whole of it
— and whichever port it goes into, not one machine in the office will pick it up
.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
Order these two by how loud they are and you will work them back to front. Once a knock has finished a head stack the event is over: no head can reach a platter, a shelf changes nothing, and the condition the drive is in today is the condition it will be in next month. It was the Iomega that could not wait, and for the opposite reason — some life was left in it. Transfer rates had dropped under the floor a USB bridge will tolerate, hence copies that gave out midway, and every fresh power-up spent a few more sectors it would never get back. What noise tells you is that something has failed. Which of the two goes on the bench first is a separate question, and answering it is the part of the job nobody pays for.
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 Seagate after its transplant: mapped, then the sound surfaces taken | 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 |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | One controlled pass over the Iomega, every hesitation capped and logged | Reads through the drive's own firmware and controller instead of working round them |
| R-Studio Technician | Both folder trees rebuilt out of the finished images | Rebuilds an array off the images, and reads almost any file system |
What happened on the bench.
The fault decides the order, not the volume
Sharing a parcel bought neither of them any priority. Left unpowered, the Seagate gives up nothing to a month of waiting; it comes out of the wrapping in the state it went in. No such margin existed on the Iomega, where surface was being spent for every hour of running. That settled the order — tired drive onto the bench, noisy one onto a shelf.
Start on the Iomega and keep going
With sectors going every time it hesitated, the Iomega was worked to a budget: a short fixed allowance governing every read, and whatever overran it noted, set aside and returned to on a gentler pass later. It stayed on the bus throughout and was never once restarted. The thing the office could not get past reduced, on the bench, to a set of ranges that shortened as the work went on, and the copy advanced at a rate we could forecast.
Then the Seagate, with no clock running
Nothing was read off the Seagate until its stack had been replaced. That was done beneath laminar flow with a matched donor set, and each head was graded before bulk copying began. From the knock, one platter surface had a score on it. The rest were clean and gave up all they held, while the marked one gave up part of its own.
What was returned.
So the office had judged it backwards. The Iomega, written off in a cupboard, came home very nearly complete, and the shortfall was on the newer unit: a single scored band holding landlord records, each of which the report names individually rather than folding into a percentage. Fresh media went back up to Derby by post, with the carriage paid here. Each drive was quoted separately at the published single-drive band of £300 + VAT, and both figures were in writing before any work began.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
More jobs off desktop disks.
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.