Christmas Day..... Hard drive failure

Over the Christmas holiday I wanted to backup my laptop as nothing lasts forever and anytime the internal drive could fail and we all know we should have a few backups of our very important data...

Unfortunatley I accidently knocked my Lacie 2TB external drive over and it was being accessed at the time. With it being the traditional spinning disks one of them would just click repeatedly for about 6 times..... the drive was damaged... As you do, I tried various recovery software programs but none of them could recover any data. The I took the enclosure apart and found one drive was okay but that unfortunately did not have the data I wanted on it.... One of the recovery programs found no end of files even though is had been formatted but the guy I bought it off and also by myself when I received it as it would not mount as he had formatted it on a Mac...

As I came to the conclusion that I had no hope in getting any data back the software way and I tried firstly freezing the drive overnight as this can sometimes free up the disk heads which get stuck in the parked position. This also failed to stop the clicking.

I then opened the hard drive as it could need human intervention to free the head. The 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200prm drive contained 4 silver disks each with it's own read/write head. These heads did not have a park system off the disks like many drives have I had seen watching a few YouTube videos so the park position for them was near the spindle so the heads never leave the face of the disks. I decided to connect it up and see what was happening.... They where skating and returning to the middle and I then forced the head to the outside of the disk platters to see if that did anything.
All this did was make the head scream creating further damage... We should never open them unless we are in a dust free environment and I knew this before doing this..

Luckily it was only my Quick Quote customer files (estimates, addresses, invoices, purchase orders) I lost no CAD work so although it did piss me off it was not the end of the world. The only backup I had was 02/09/16 which I reloaded onto a new drive. Luckily I sleep my old XP laptop at the end of the day and I was able to save the customers estimate that was coming in to deposit on the second day back from the Christmas break so I did not have to redo it... Happy days LOL...

Anyway, it has made me more aware of how fragile a hard drive is and although they are tested to withstand 350Gs or so this is only when not powered up. going from a vertical position, which the designer of the LACIE enclosures make them a stand for them this way, to an horizonal position can be fatal.
I have now got a new LACIE 4TB external drive which I have not fixed the designed stand on but have it on the silicone strips horizonal.
Do not move an hard disc while powered up and don't knock it over!

Make sure you all have a backup plan

I can recommend the new Lacie drive which I think is good value for money.... they are also owned by Seagate:

The LaCie 4TB d2 Quadra v3 Hard Drive
Universal connectivity and compatibility
Professional grade: 5Gb/s interface, 7200rpm drives
Save space: stackable and rack-mount option
Advanced power modes for energy savings

http://www.wexphotovideo.com/lacie-4tb-d2-quadra-v3-hard-drive-1537218/