Case study of a Western Digital Caviar SE 500GB
Clicking Western Digital Caviar SE
WD5000AAJS-22YFA0
WD Family: Tornado 2R
We received a call from a customer who had dropped their external drive onto the floor. When plugged it into the computer, it just made clicking sounds. Can we recover the data from a clicking hard drive ?
Once the drive was in the lab, it was immediately clear what the problem was.
Aside from a malfunctioning head stack assembly, there was no other physical damage to the drive. We felt confident to continue with the recovery by replacing the damaged head stack assembly with a fresh new head stack.
Once this was completed, we had to make some firmware adjustments to the drives operating system (SA). This is to stabilise the drive enough to get a good sector-by-sector image of the drive. Therefore, hoping to get our customer a good result.
To conclude this case study, we got our customer a 100% recovery which we were very pleased with, as was the customer 
For specs and more information about ‘Western Digital Caviar SE’ hard drives, please visit the WD support page here
If you need help recovering data from a clicking Western Digital drive, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us here