One of our computer shop partners in Walpole MA received a desktop computer with a clicking 160GB WD Hard Disk Drive in need of data recovery service. Matter of fact it was a RAID 1 array of two drives of the same model HDD, where one failed months ago and the other just recently.

Back in 2007, when those WD 1600JD hard drives started failing, the majority of failures were mechanical in nature, however, quite frequently the servo delimitations would also get all scrambled. The various capacity model drives in the Eagle family have become notoriously known as the “servo destroyers”, haha.

Well, here we are about a decade later when, data recovery companies still see those models coming in for file recovery. For our drive, after performing the mechanical work in a cleanroom environment, the data recovery technicians were able to clone successfully 3 out of the 4 surfaces. The forth surface is completely inaccessible, even after trying a variety of trade tricks using data recovery software and hardware techniques. As in the old days, the problem was the servo being damaged.

In this scenario, only a partial recovery was possible. Still many documents, pictures, PDFs, quickbooks and other type of files were recovered successfully. It is as good as any data recovery company can recover.