These hard drives store an unusual amount of their own operating code in a reserved service area on the disk. If some of it cannot be read, then the drive will spin perfectly, report nothing, and the user data will remain completely intact behind the unreadable section.
A large share of these arrive spinning properly but report the wrong capacity or an empty model ID string, or simply do not report anything. This is a failure within the service area of the drive's firmware, and one of the better outcomes available.
Seagate produces more of the hard-drive units that reach our lab than any other hard drive manufacturer, due to market share rather than reliability. Therefore, we see a wide range of failures from Seagate products; however, there are two specific failure patterns that occur frequently for Seagate products and are therefore worth knowing about.
The first is the 7200.11 generation of drives, which had an issue with firmware that caused the drive to show no capacity or appear to be stuck busy. Nothing was physically wrong with these drives: they were simply experiencing inconsistencies in their service area modules and needed to be fixed at firmware level rather than mechanically.
The second is SMR. Later generations of Barracudas wrote data to higher densities by writing overlapping tracks, and this created a situation where if you tried to image a failing SMR drive it would take significantly longer than when trying to image a conventional drive. While the time it took to complete the job was affected, the success of completing the job remained unaffected.
Barracuda ST1000DM010, ST2000DM008, ST4000DM004 A desktop workhorse. Head degradation and stalling reads. The 2-4TB models use SMR and therefore will image slowly.
7200.11 ST3500320AS, ST31000340AS This is the firmware generation of the drives. These drives will detect as having 0 GB or appear to be stuck in a “busy” state. There is nothing physically wrong with these drives; there just needs to be some level of repair done to the service area module.
IronWolf ST4000VN008 Duty cycle for NAS. Arrive worn out, not shocked, after years of continuous operation: surface wear across the entire platter.
SkyHawk ST2000VX008 Constantly written upon by surveillance systems. Frequently pulled from DVR systems where the footage is more important than the hard disk.
Exos and Constellation In general, enterprise SAS/SATA hard drives are installed into servers or storage arrays. As such, they are usually array members rather than standalone failures.
Momentus and Barracuda 2.5-inch Hard drives used in laptops. The typical complaint about these laptop drives is a head crash after being dropped.
In order for a Seagate donor drive to be compatible, it must have the correct family, head configuration, and firmware revision. For example, two Seagate hard drives with identical model numbers and capacities may still be incompatible as they can each contain different “head maps”. When these do not match, the replacement head stack will not be able to read data on the surface below it.
We maintain inventory of both Barracuda and Momentus families of hard drives in various generations due to the large number of them coming from this region; where an older or lesser-known family requires sourcing, this will affect the timeframe to obtain parts but does not affect the final outcome, and you would be notified of this during diagnosis as opposed to 3 weeks later.
Classic 7200.11 firmware failure, if it is from that generation. This type of failure occurs without any form of physical damage. The service area modules require repair using vendor mode. Complete recovery is possible in many cases.
Seagate has some drives that come with a rescue plan. Prior to paying for any recovery service (even us) you should first see if this will apply to your model number and purchase date. If it does, use it.
It is mechanical and time-critical. Turn it off and don't turn it back on again to check. Any other attempts after this may result in damaging the platter.
You may expect to experience a longer time to image the data due to the SMR technology being implemented into a failing 4 TB hard disk drive instead of using traditional non-SMR technology, although you are no less likely to successfully complete an image operation.
Costs start at £300 +VAT per single drive, fixed in a written quote from us following the completion of a free 48-hour diagnostic period. Costs for array members begin at £500 +VAT.