Case study of a 1 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive
Seagate Data Recovery
Seagate Backup Plus Drive is one of several types of mobile hard drives in the Seagate family.
Samsung Spinpoint ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB/AV2
Part Number: 1K9AP3-500
Drive Family: M8E
The customer told us they had dropped their hard drive off the kitchen table directly onto a tiled floor. Once plugged into the laptop, it clicked, also making strange sounds like it was being repeatedly unplugged from the computer.
Knowing it wasn’t a good idea to keep powering up the drive, they found a reputable company to send it to. And you guessed it, that reputable company was us, Dragon Data Recovery 
Once a hard drive has started clicking, denying access to the data, DIY data recovery is no longer an option. Professional data recovery is the only way to proceed (if you value the data).
Initially, we thought it might have been a Seagate Rosewood hiding inside this blue casing. However, it was a relief to find a Samsung hard drive tightly nestled inside. This immediately increased the chances of recovery due to being well-engineered hard disk drives and very robust. Unlike Seagate Rosewood drives which are unreliable junk.
So, off to the cleanroom to inspect the damage, caused by the fall, to this Samsung ST1000LM024 hard disk drive…
There didn’t seem to be any visible damage to the immediate platter surfaces to warrant fully stripping the drive down. Therefore, we decided it would be worthwhile fitting a new head stack assembly. Which would get us a step closer to repairing the drive ready for a Samsung Data Recovery.
After the new head stack assembly had been fitted to the clicking Samsung hard disk drive, the drive was powered up on our PC 3000 Express data recovery machine and thankfully only needed a few tweaks to the firmware to stabilise it. Meaning, we could now get on with the task of imaging the customers data and hope for a good result.
Data Recovery
And a good result we got !
Therefore, the moral of this story is don’t keep powering up a drive once it has had a drop onto a hard surface, try it once at your peril, and if it clicks or beeps, power it off and seek out a professional data recovery firm who can deal with those type of issues.
For specs and more information about the ‘Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive’ please visit their main support page here
If you need help recovering data from a Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us here