A LaCie LRD0TU9 with a damaged port, connecting intermittently and less often each time. The drive carried millions of bad sectors and was imaged on DeepSpar hardware rather than copied conventionally.
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The client identified the symptom accurately: a physically damaged port, and a drive connecting intermittently with decreasing frequency. They wanted the contents moved onto another drive.
Decreasing connection frequency is a warning worth acting on immediately. Whatever the underlying cause, the number of remaining opportunities to read that drive was falling, and each unsuccessful attempt consumed one of them.
Assessment found the drive riddled with bad sectors — millions of them. That volume of defects makes conventional copying not merely slow but actively harmful.
A normal file copy retries a failed sector repeatedly, because the operating system assumes the disk is basically healthy and its job is to return that data. On a drive with millions of defects, those retries keep the drive working at maximum effort for hours against regions it cannot read, and the drive deteriorates further while it happens.
The data was extracted from the image. The drive itself was not returned to service, and a drive in that condition should not be.
This job illustrates the practical difference between imaging and copying more clearly than most. The same physical disk, approached two ways, produces two entirely different outcomes — and the conventional approach is the one that fails.
A drive that connects less often each time has a limited number of reads left. Every failed attempt spends one of them.
Your computer retries a bad sector hard. Imaging hardware reads once, moves on, and comes back later with different settings. On a badly degraded drive that difference decides the outcome.
Defect density affects how long imaging takes and how much comes back. It does not automatically make a drive unrecoverable.