Has Seagate Rendered DIY Data Recovery Useless?

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WestDonovan

Reputable
Jan 5, 2015
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One day your Seagate HDD fails and you extract the internal HDD in hopes of recovering your data by putting it into a docking station and poof…all your data’s gone just like that, and only 1.5 TB is read instead of the full 3TB or 4TB. It’s scary to think such a thing could happen.
Reading this my steer you clear of purchasing 3.5 inch Seagate Backup Plus HDDs if you intend to use it as it is.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1S0WAC0NHTPOK/ref=pdp_new_read_full_review_link?ie=UTF8&page=1&sort_by=MostRecentReview#R325MRJEEQLDB3
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1WYFTW713R2DM/ref=pdp_new_read_full_review_link?ie=UTF8&page=1&sort_by=MostRecentReview#RR1X3PIG4PDDR
So now we know this applies to the Backup Plus range?
Before I could be confident that if my 5TB Expansion HDD was to fail, I’d be able to rescue the data by extracting the internal drive, and slot it into a docking station. But Seagate has updated the look of their 3.5 inch Expansion models. Can we be sure what happened with the Backup Plus HDDs won’t happen with the Expansion range too?
Although I have backups, it would be nice to have that option in your pocket.
 
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greens

greens

Splendid
Jan 27, 2012
3,773
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Readable size is dependent on firmware.
Your external has firmware capable of handling large drives, greater than 2TB.
Your docking bay does not. This is likely clearly defined in user manuals and spec sheets. You may have not been on the scene when 2TB drives became more popular; there are a bunch of issues associated with them.

A quick search shows that the drives are formatted in NTFS out of the box, and should be no different than any other drive. Why did you use a docking bay? I highly recommend you use a more simple device, such as a SATA cable or eSATA cable to eliminate these issues in the future. Docks are useful, but it is a limited scope.
 
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T

TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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As greens already mentoined this is a porblem with the dock not the drive, but aside from that...
What world do you live in where a failed drive's data can be recovered confidently by just taking it out of the enclosure?

Enclosure failure accounts for less than 15% of drive failures and in the vast majority of circumstances where a drive becomes inaccessible it's due to head/HRA failure.

DIY data recovery has always been useless because you can always get a free evaluation from a professional lab and DIY methods are more likely to do further damage than to recover the data successfully.
 
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B

BadAsAl

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Oct 13, 2009
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A professional lab will give you an evaluation for free. If they can recover you are looking at $1000 or more. If you are never ever going to pay this then your only hope is to try it yourself.

I have taken drives out of enclosures and read them with a dock or another enclosure so not sure why this is not a good step to try.

Sure, you can further damage the disk if there is physical contact with the heads for example but if this is the case even the professional services are going to have a hard time.

OP can get another exact drive and swap his broken drive into the enclosure. Or try another generic enclosure for higher capacity drives. There are lots of other things to try before giving up. I have made many a person happy when I got stuff back that they thought was gone forever and I am no rocket scientist. I just googled and read and tried different things.
 
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