Desktop externals · case log · RDG-2025-1484
The Noisy One Was Not the Urgent One.
Two drives, one parcel, sent in when a lettings and property management agency in Newbury closed the smaller of its two offices. Slow after years shut in a stationery cupboard, the Iomega was brought out to take a final copy of the archive and never got through one: about ten minutes into a folder and it vanishes
. Everybody had put that down to it being how old it must be by now
. Nobody looked any further than that. The Seagate was the newer of the pair, and it had lived on top of a filing cabinet. A removals trolley clipped it, and since then: clicks, and clicks, and does nothing else
, and no machine in the office picks it up
.
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What actually caused it.
Order them by noise and you would work them the wrong way round. A head stack finished by a knock is a closed event — the heads cannot reach the platters, nothing more happens to it on a shelf, and the drive we unwrap in a month is the drive we unwrapped this week. Urgency belonged to the Iomega, precisely because it was still half alive. Its transfer rate had fallen under what a USB bridge will tolerate, which is why every copy stalled part way through, and each power-up cost it a few more sectors permanently. That a drive has failed is what noise tells you. Which of two to open first is a different question, and working that out is the part nobody pays for.
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 | Seagate after its transplant: mapped first, then the sound surfaces | 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 | A single controlled pass over the Iomega, with every stall capped and logged | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt both folder trees from the finished images | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
Which fault you have decides the queue
Sharing a parcel gave neither drive priority. Unpowered, the Seagate loses nothing by waiting a month — it will reach the bench in the condition it left the wrapping. The Iomega had no such margin, because every hour under power was costing it surface. So the worn drive went on first and the clicking one waited on a shelf.
Begin with the Iomega and don't stop
Stalls were costing sectors, so each was rationed: a short fixed budget per read, and any range that ran past it was noted, set aside, and revisited later on a gentler pass. The Iomega never had to be restarted and never left the bus. What had defeated the office turned into a shrinking list of ranges, and the copy advanced at a predictable rate.
The Seagate afterwards, with no clock on it
Nothing came off that drive until the stack was changed. Under laminar flow a matched donor set was fitted, then every head went through grading on the bench ahead of any bulk copying. One platter surface carried a score from the knock. The others came through clean and yielded everything they held; the scored surface yielded a portion of its own.
What went back.
The office had it backwards. The Iomega — written off in the stationery cupboard — returned very nearly whole. The gap lay on the newer unit: one scored band, and the landlord records inside it, each named in the report instead of rounded into a percentage. New media went to Newbury by post, carriage paid at this end.
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Other desk-drive jobs.
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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.