Portable drives · bench record · RDG-2025-1458
One Fall Onto Concrete, Then Only Ticking.
Two seasons of weddings existed in exactly one place. A Woodley photographer had delivered the finished JPEGs to his couples months before and cleared them off the laptop for space, which left the RAW files sitting alone on a single portable drive. A bag left unzipped put that drive onto a concrete driveway. What it does now: ticks half a dozen times, then shuts up
; a blue light comes on and nothing else does
. Held on the platters: every raw frame off two summers of weddings
.
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What actually caused it.
Track position is not guesswork. Servo marks are put onto each platter at the factory and the head steers by them, so knock the stack out of true and those marks arrive as noise. The arm crosses the surface, matches nothing, withdraws to its ramp, and begins the whole sequence over — and it is that sequence, repeating, which you can hear. The blue light proves nothing at all, since it glows whenever the USB board is powered, regardless of what state the mechanism behind it is in. He gave the drive one more go, saw the identical performance, and then stopped. That decision is why there is still an archive to talk about.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Graded the heads first, which left the weakest surface until the very end | It maps the heads before anything is taken off, keeps to one platter side per pass, and stays in charge of the resets, the timeouts and the power |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | With the replacement stack fitted, imaged a zone at a time, firmware first | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Assembled the exFAT volume from the copy, then opened every CR3 in turn | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
Sleeve off, bridge unplugged, an ordinary SATA disk
Strip the rubber, take the small USB board off, and what remains is a 2.5in SATA unit like thousands of others — the driveway is the only thing about it that is unusual. It then runs on bench power, so the platters move when we decide they should, rather than because some operating system has gone off hunting for a volume to mount.
A donor stack, then a survey before a single sector is copied
A donor was needed matching on both family and firmware revision, and one was found. Once the stack was transplanted the drive identified itself again, though it would still release nothing. A head survey came next: each head timed and scored on how cleanly it pulled, so the imaging order was set by this particular disk instead of by a standard recipe. One head ran steadily from start to finish. The other lagged, stumbled repeatedly, and its platter surface was left until last.
Strongest head leading, the doubtful one at the back
Work opened on the good side, timeouts kept short and the power cycled at each stall. By the time the weaker head was asked for anything, most of the archive was already copied. Its platter then went at whatever rate it would give. Six days from bench to sign-off. Patience is not a courtesy on a drive that has met concrete; it is the only way the job finishes at all.
What went back.
Every CR3 was opened and displayed before a thing left the lab: a directory listing full of filenames is worth nothing to a photographer whose pictures will not render. The recovered archive went home on new media, and before the day was out a second copy had been written to another drive — so two seasons of weddings now sit in two places rather than one.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Other portable drives on the log.
If that sounds like yours, stop there.
Post it in as it is, switched off. Looking costs nothing, and you get one fixed figure in writing before any chargeable work begins — £250 + VAT for a card or stick, £300 + VAT for a single drive, from £500 + VAT for RAID and NAS. On most jobs, nothing is charged unless your data comes back.