We hear the words “my hard drive has crashed” at least a hundred times a month and yet it is seldom what we discover when we open the lid of someones “crashed” hard drive. The picture below shows two Seagate 500 GB hard drives we recently received for data recovery. Both drives were declared crashed by their owners! However only one appears to be physically crashed.

The drive on the left is in pristine condition. The disks are extremely shiny and consistent across the entire surface of the disk surface. The clients problem was determined to be a bad PCB or printed circuit board.

The drive on the right is not so pristine and has physically CRASHED! The smooth shiny disk surface has been scored and ringed by constant contact with the heads while the disks were spinning. This amount of damage could only occur if the drive was left running for a long period after the initial contact damage. Click on the picture for a closer more shocking look.

The drive on the left should be recoverable. The drive on the right is NOT recoverable.

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