A WD Caviar WD1600BB-59GUC0 manufactured in August 2005 and out of service since 2006. It would start and show folder structures very slowly, then fail to open most folders and fail on almost every copy. The contents were potentially material to a police investigation.
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The symptom pattern was specific and informative. The drive spun, identified itself and presented a directory structure — but slowly, and with most folder opens and copy operations failing.
That is not the profile of a mechanical failure. A drive with head damage generally cannot present a file system at all. A drive that reads its own structures, however slowly, is reading successfully some of the time, which points at the electronics and the firmware rather than the heads.
The material was potentially relevant to a police investigation, so handling was documented throughout.
Assessment identified a faulty circuit board alongside a firmware fault. The two frequently present together on drives of this generation: degraded board components produce marginal behaviour, and the drive's own service area accumulates errors as a result.
The very slow directory reads and widespread copy failures were consistent with a drive struggling to complete operations rather than one physically unable to reach the data.
The data was recovered following board replacement and firmware correction. No clean-air work was required — the platters and heads were never the problem.
Twenty-year-old drives arrive here regularly and their age affects donor and board availability rather than recoverability. Our parts inventory covers IDE-era families precisely because this work keeps appearing.
A drive that reads its own directory structures very slowly is completing operations at the limit of what it can manage. That is a hardware report, not a performance issue.
Each board carries calibration data unique to its own drive. Fitting a donor board without transferring that data does not work on anything of this generation or later.
A drive from 2005 is recoverable. What changes is how long it takes to source a matching board or donor, which is why stock of legacy families matters.