Case study of a Samsung M3 Portable 1 TB
Recovering a Beeping Samsung M3 1TB hard drive
Samsung M3 portable drives are one of several types of mobile hard drives in the Seagate family.
ST1000LM025 HN-M101ABB/EX2
Model: HX-M101TCB/G
Samsung Family: M8E
The customer dropped their hard drive and when they plugged it back into the laptop they noticed all it did was make a beeping sound. They said it made no difference how many times they plugged it into computers, all it did was go beep beep beep and sounded like something was stuck.
So, after a brief chat about costs, they decided to send it to us for Samsung data recovery.
Once we had the drive in our lab for cleanroom data recovery, it was immediately apparent that the drive was suffering from stiction. This is where the heads become stuck to the platters and the motor doesn’t have enough torque to release them, so they hold onto the platter surfaces like they have been glued to them.
DIY Data Recovery
This is NOT a DIY Data Recovery solution, as you need a cleanroom environment, specialist tooling, skills and a PC3000 to get a good result.
However, we often hear people saying they have opened their drive to see if the heads were stuck – like it’s a thing whereby you just drag them off the platters and carry on as before – which couldn’t be any further from the truth.
Firstly, the heads never touch the platter surfaces as they fly across them on a cushion of air. Known as the air bearing, at a height of 3 nanometres (less than the thickness of a hair).
Secondly, they stick to the platter surfaces like glue. Therefore, it can be very common for damage to occur, to both the heads and the platter surfaces.
And finally, dragging the damaged heads across the platters will only result in more damage to the platter surfaces. Thus, what do you think will happen when you power this mess back up and spin it at 5400 RPM? Yes, that’s right, those damaged heads will unlatch and fly across the platter surfaces scratching them even more!
So, when you hear a ‘YouTuber’ telling you to just open the lid and drag the heads off the platters. Understand that their advice will typically cost you your data in the quest for DIY Data Recovery.
DON’T DO IT!
In contrast, when we professionally release the stuck heads, we then inspect them under our powerful microscope. Most of the time we don’t re-use them as it’s just too risky. We favour installing a brand-new fresh head stack assembly and typically get great results from both ST1000LM025 and ST1000LM024 drives.
To conclude this case study, we got our customer a 100% recovery which we were very pleased with. As was the customer 
