Pocket hard drives · case notes · RDG-2025-2256
Fifteen Years of Teaching, and No Light at All.
Coursework moderation was still waiting, it was half term, and in a Hungerford house one pocket drive held fifteen years of design and technology teaching — the schemes of work, the CAD files, footage of everything my classes ever built
. The drive was doing nothing whatever: no light, no movement, it might as well be a brick
. She had already been through the obvious remedies — four cables, both computers at home, two more in the department
— and the school technician, having got no further, told her to stop before it got worse. It went in the post.
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What actually caused it.
Silence has three possible authors, and while the case is shut you cannot tell which one you have. First, the small board that converts USB to the SATA connector on the disk. Second, the firmware, which is not held in a chip but written on the platters themselves. Third, the mechanism, turning or seized. What each costs to put right differs enormously. Leads and ports had been ruled out already, so the next move was obvious: take the shell off and stand the bare disk on a bench. Conveniently, the commonest of the three is also the cheapest, so that is where testing starts.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Bare disk on bench power, to tell three identical-looking faults apart | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Full sector copy across a direct SATA link, the bridge board taken out of the route | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt the volume and wrote the entire tree out to new hardware | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
Case open, disk onto a bench port
A minute after coming out of its shell and onto a bench port, the disk was answering. Spindle up to speed. Correct model string. Service commands acknowledged one after another. The silence had been entirely the bridge board's doing. Nothing else lets a SATA disk speak USB, so when that board fails it removes its light, its handshake and every other outward sign at one stroke.
Image it down a path that still functions
Take the failed board out of the path and the disk behaved as though nothing had happened to it. Full rated throughput end to end, a log with no read errors in it at all, the factory defect list sitting precisely where firmware expects to find it. A bridge fault looks like this on a bench, and from the first sector to the last, this one did.
Return it on hardware that works
On the new disk the tree came out precisely as she had built it. Year 9 sits under Schemes of Work, where she put it. The moderation folders are where she expects to find them. Nothing was renamed and nothing was tipped into one flat directory. The only difference is the box her work lives in.
What went back.
So fifteen years went home whole, filed the way she files, and checked before the parcel was sealed. Not one page of it had ever been stored on the component that failed — a component that costs a few pounds to replace.
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.