Every time a client calls our office and utters the phrase, "I just dropped my external hard drive", I wince and fear the worst. I always feel bad for a client that finds themselves in this situation.
This is the worst that can happen to a hard drive, beside damage to platter area. When an external hard drive has been dropped, whatever the height, internal components will most likely get the brunt of it. The first component to get the brunt of it is the motor. That is why the next thing the client would say is "I plug it in and now it is not spinning". This is where I cringe. Of all the things that can go wrong, we always hope that it is not the motor. I don't think anybody in data recovery industry likes to hear about motor issue on a hard drive with multiple disks. Hey, if it is a single platter hard drive, we would give a sigh of relief. We welcome a laptop hard drive with multiple platter disks with motor issue. Ask why. The simple answer is alignment.
Ok. Let me explain what happen to the motor first, and then the alignment issue. The motor is the component that the platters sit on nicely and turns them at a given rpm. Inside the motor, we find motor bearings. These bearings help the motor turn smoothly with no vibration. Storage Review has a great reference guide related to the ins and outs of disk drives. You should read it if you want to know more.
Now, when an external hard drive is dropped, and the motor does not spin, the bearings most likely are dislodged from their grooves and clog the space the motor needs to spin. Many times, the motor becomes rigid that no torque force applied will do any good. In some cases, the motor is less rigid, but will not turn freely. In either case, it does not look good.
About alignment: When the motor cease or become rigid after the drop, especially when the hard drive was running, the disk platters may shift. The abrupt stop of the platters may shift them slightly off the motor. Hard drives with multiple platter disks are aligned at some time before shipment. For example, when a drive reads track 0, it reads track 0 for all surfaces. The tracks are aligned, and so the sectors on the tracks. So any shift, would misaligned the sectors from one platter to the next. So any shift, whatever small it is, will render the drive inoperable for data recovery. It is safe to say that no one can realign platters on a 3.5" form factor drives found on desktops and externals.
Even without a disk platter shift, motor issues are the Achilles' heel of data recovery. You can't simply remove the platters and move them on another disk. Some companies have introduced some platter tools, but there is nothing out there we know of is 100% full proof.
Another component that usually gets damaged is the read/write head stack. The read/write heads, upon the drop, would smack on the platter, or the ramp (on some drives, it is outside of the platter). The outer edge of platters with ramp sometimes gets damaged where the outer edge of platters meet the ramp.
As you can see, there are many things that can go wrong with a dropped external. Now, what are you doing to prevent that from happening to you? It is almost an epidemic that we get this type of calls from clients, and I always feel bad for them.
Here is how I can help you. If your external hard drive sits on a stand, lay it flat. Lay it flat even without a stand. If the stand is attached with screws, remove it, and lay it flat. It may look nice on the stand on your desk, but it will look bad if you knock it off the desk. Manufactures should know by now to design all of them to be flat on the desk.
We deal with a lot of external hard drives. We used them to save client data. We tell our engineers to place them flat on their belly to copy the recovered data.
Once you put them flat, keep the power cord and USB wire out of reach of children, dogs and yourself. Once you trip on them, the external hard drive will fly off your desk, and I will wince. We are sometimes negligent with power cords and power strips. Do not overload your outlets, it is a fire hazard. Shorten the length of your power cords by tying them neatly. It saves to be neat with your power cords.
Avoid moving your external hard drive too often. Get a 2.5" one if you have to move it often from one computer to the next.
If you have important data on your external hard drive, my wish for you is to take precautionary actions before you find yourselves uttering this phase, "I dropped my external hard drive". I will wince, and anybody else in this business will wince. It will cost you a lot if it can be recovered; and it will cost you more when it cannot be recovered.
Accident will happen, but backing up your data will make you the wisest.
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