Portable drives · job record · RDG-2025-1487
That Noise Was Never Coming From the Socket.
The whole workshop knew the routine, because a folded piece of card had been wedged under that plug for two years: push it home, then lift it slightly to the left
. Two years of that, and nobody dug any further. Then the Backup Plus made a noise none of them had heard before — light still on, a single flat note that ran and ran — and not a machine in the unit on Headley Road East in Woodley would list it. A new socket was offered by somebody up the road. He rang us instead.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
0800 6890668
What actually caused it.
This is where the wrong answer is easy to reach. Two years of one thing going wrong in one place trains everybody to keep looking at that place. A worn socket does genuine harm on its own account: half-finished transfers, a drive that leaves the desktop and reappears, files with gaps through the middle. Reaching into a sealed body and gripping a spindle is not among its powers. Bad contact costs you signal and nothing else; it puts no force into the mechanics. When a tone keeps sounding until the power is pulled, the motor is straining at something solid, and on a portable drive the usual explanation is that the heads have touched down and taken hold. So the fault had moved across the lid, away from the plug entirely — and a new socket would have repaired the half that no longer mattered.
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 | Separated a two-year-old socket fault from a stall that had begun that week | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Casing removed, and the drive read straight off a SATA port | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Copy mounted, and each restoration job lifted out of it in turn | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
Which fault is which
Two minutes with a bench supply, current limited, and it was settled. The draw climbed, and kept climbing — the motor pushing at something that would not move — until the unit shut off its own power. Then silence. A stall, with no argument left to have. He had described the plug perfectly accurately and it was entirely beside the point: the case had to come off regardless, which ended the socket's part in the job.
Stack away, casing set aside
With the lid off under clean air, the heads sat precisely where that tone said they would — resting on the discs, well clear of the ramp built to park them. The stack came off for inspection, and the band of platter underneath carried no marking of any kind. From then on the drive worked from a plain SATA port, two years of packed-out cable made no difference to anything, and no iron went near the socket.
A single pass, on a connection that stays up
Turning freely at last, the drive handed over the whole disk overnight in one run, first sector to last. It stayed on the bus, reset itself not once, and produced none of the dropping in and out the workshop had lived with for years. Almost certainly its best read ever, and definitely its final one.
What went back.
A decade of the workshop went home, checked item by item against the job book: progress photographs from every restoration, scanned handbooks, invoices for parts. The second copy now lives at his brother's house and gets compared against the working one. That folded card went in the bin. The job sat in the published band for a single drive, £300 + VAT, quoted in writing first.
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.