Off the desk mid-backup, out of a bag on the way to the station, knee-height onto a tiled floor — a drop is the most democratic drive killer there is, and the outcome turns on a single question: was it spinning? The bench sees the aftermath daily, and the free diagnostic reads exactly what the fall broke.
$ ldr diagnose /dev/sda → Device: LaCie Rugged (USB-C) → Status: WATER DAMAGE — dropped in loch → Client: confidential · Scarborough $ ldr engineer-working → Board: cleaned, not powered dry → Heads: donor set fitted → Imaging: 98% · corrosion mapped $ ldr verify → ✓ field_footage — recovered → ✓ project_files — back → ✓ never dried it — right call
Powered and spinning is the bad fall: heads fly nanometres above the platters, and an impact can slap them into the surface — head damage at minimum, surface scoring at worst, announced afterwards by the classic post-drop click. Powered off is kinder: heads are parked off the platters, and the usual casualties are the spindle bearings (drive won’t spin, faint buzz) or nothing at all. Either way the honest rule is identical — a dropped drive gets one gentle assessment, not a week of hopeful retries, because a marginally-damaged head destroyed by retry number nine was a recovery lost to impatience, not to the fall.
Not all impact damage is a fall. Laptops closed on a pair of earbuds, or sat on inside a bag, arrive with the drive intact and the board cracked; USB sticks bend at the connector while their flash untouched; microSDs snap and still surrender their chips to direct reading; externals survive the fall but shatter their USB ports. The pattern across all of them: the storage medium is tougher than its plumbing, and recovery is very often repairing the plumbing just long enough to image everything through it. Whatever hit yours — box it as-is, loose parts included, and let the diagnostic assign the odds for free.
Back it up this minute, while it’s still cooperating. A drive that survived a drop may be marginally damaged and running on borrowed calibration. Copy the irreplaceable first, then everything. If it falters mid-copy, stop and bring it in; a half backup plus a careful image beats pushing a wounded drive to the end.
Usually, yes — parked heads forgive a great deal. But an unpowered fall can still seize a spindle bearing or crack solder, so if it won’t spin, won’t mount, or simply sounds different, treat it as injured. The free diagnostic settles it either way without a paid guess.
It really does. The standard is simple: immobilised in padding, a snug box, no rattle. A failed drive survives an ordinary journey perfectly well; what it cannot afford is tumbling around inside a roomy box. Two minutes of bubble wrap protects everything the recovery depends on.