Off the back of the desk in the middle of a backup; out of a bag on the way to the train station; from about knee-high level down onto tile. A drop may be the ultimate democracy of hard drive killers, as all that matters is one thing: was it rotating? We see the aftermath of this every day, and the free diagnostic shows exactly what the fall broke.
The powered and spinning crash: heads go flying nanometres above the disks, and with enough force they will be slapped onto the disk surface, head damage at least and disk surface scoring at worst. Followed immediately after by that typical post-drop click. A powered down drop is less brutal; heads are parked off the disks. The most common victims of this type of drop are the spindle bearings, in which case your drive may fail to spin but you’ll likely hear it making a faint buzzing noise. Or you’ll see no sign of anything being wrong. In either event, the honest truth is exactly the same for both drops: a dropped drive receives one light test, not a full week of attempts to recover from that drop. This is because a marginally damaged head ruined by attempt number nine to try and recover would have been due to impatience, rather than the initial drop.
It is important to note that an item does not have to be dropped to suffer impact damage. A laptop can close upon two earbuds, or a laptop may be sat on inside a laptop bag, and the drive will remain intact and the motherboard damaged. A USB stick can bend at the connection and the internal memory area remain unaffected. MicroSD cards are subject to cracking; however, the chips contained within are recoverable from the card when read directly. Externals can withstand drops but are likely to crack their USB port. All items follow a similar path. In each case, the storage device is much stronger than the “plumbing” that supports it. Recovery is typically achieved by restoring enough functionality to the “plumbing” so that we can image everything out of it. Regardless of what happened to your item, simply package it as-is with all pieces loose inside and allow the free diagnostic to determine whether there was damage and, if so, how extensive.
Back up all of your files now. While you are lucky enough for the hard drive to still be working after being dropped, there is also a possibility of damage from the fall. In addition, the drive may be running on borrowed calibration. Therefore, copy all of your irreplaceable files first. After you have copied these, start with copying the rest of your files. If the drive fails during the file copy process, stop immediately and bring it in to us. It would be better to have a partial backup plus a careful image than to risk losing even more files by trying to complete the backup.
Yes, usually. Heads that do not move when powered off will often survive a drop (a good thing). However, it is possible for an unpowered fall to damage a bearing in the spindle, crack the solder, etc., and therefore if your drive cannot spin at all, does not want to mount, or generally just has some kind of unusual noise coming from it, consider it damaged. Our free diagnostic will tell you whether or not your drive needs to be repaired, and what specifically is wrong with it.
Yes, it does. The process is straightforward: secured with foam to prevent movement during transport, and contained within a compact box that will not cause items to move about while being transported. A failed unit will survive an average trip unscathed; however, it can be destroyed if it moves excessively within a large shipping box. Using bubble wrap for approximately 2 minutes will protect all critical elements necessary for successful recovery from damage caused by excessive movement during shipment.