home types of media failure service warranty reseller contact us enquiries about us

 

You don’t really think about them. Hundreds of gigabytes of stuff that you have accumulated in your computer all neatly and safely tucked away in your hard disk. You treat it as your storeroom or attic. Out of sight, out of mind. But you expect them to be there when you need them. But the fact is although today’s hard disk drives are well-designed and manufactured to exacting standards, they are compact devices packed densely with intricate mechanical and electronic components which operate at very high speeds within incredibly minute tolerances.

Nearly all the hard disks made today come from a few manufacturers: Seagate (includes Maxtor which was acquired by Seagate in 2006), Western Digital, Samsung, or Hitachi. Fujitsu and Toshiba are also active hard disk manufacturers but not for the desktop market.

There are a few ways hard disk drives can fail and some failures can have more than one cause.

Corrupted firmware


The hard disk firmware is software embedded in the hard disk hardware that acts like a air traffic controller managing the data and supporting information that goes to and fro the hard disk and the host computer. If this firmware is corrupted, the hard disk will power up but the computer will hang in booting up or after booting up the hard disk is either incorrectly recognised not recognised at all. While you will not be able to access the hard disk at all, the good thing is that the data on the hard disk is intact.

Controller failure


Every hard disk has a controller board, it is a circuit board that is the control tower of the hard drive and is the brains without which nothing will work. Being electronic, the controller board can be disturbed or totally disabled by a surge in the power supply. If the controller is malfunctioning, the hard disk does not even power up and act if it is not even connected. Again, here the good news is that the integrity of your data remains undisturbed if nothing is else to further damage the hard disk.

Logical failures


Here damage occurs on the file system structures. The data still physically resides on hard disk but their location data is lost or messed up. Logical failures can be caused by power failures, RAID controller malfunctions, virus attacks, or the deletion of key files or registry components, and in some cases even electro-static discharge. The disk is usually still recognised by the computer BIOS but no further than that. Many cases of logical damage can be quite easily repaired by software tools, in some cases, they can equally cause further damage to the data on the disk. Recovery is also made much more difficult if the data is heavily fragmented on the hard disk.

Mechanical failure


This is the worst type of failure where the hardware of the hard disk itself malfunctions. There would be some cases where the hard disk gives clues of impending total failure by unusual sounds like scraping, clicking, whining or grinding noises. This could mean anything from the infamous head crash or the drive’s gears or bearings giving up. The bad news is that your hard disk’s days are numbered. The good news is that you have a chance to take immediate action to back up your data. Unfortunately, in most cases, mechanical failure is sudden and catastrophic. The chances of data recovery, if done soon after the incident and professionally executed, are surprisingly good. This is because of the specialist facilities, tools and software that are used in such recoveries. But amateurish recovery attempts can cause irreparable damage to the data and may even make meaningful recovery impossible even for seasoned specialists.