Devices · USB and portable drives
All external drives include a piece that the internal ones do not: a USB bridge between the port and the disk. This part can fail for its own reason and often contains the encryption key. Add the handling it gets in a bag, and when it comes time to test, there are two distinct failures to tell apart, each of which must be identified during bench testing after the unit arrives from Maidenhead.
Describe the fault to an engineer
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| The symptom | The likely cause | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it | When you pull a cable during a write, the volume is RAW and the files under it will be fine | Don't click on Format |
| USB device not recognized — the last device you connected malfunctioned | There's no announcement from the bridge or disk | Test another cable, then stop |
| Code 43 — Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | The device will never announce itself to Windows | Bench work: bridge electronics |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) — the drive is not accessible | Bad sectors on the disk inside the case | Unplug it and stop |
| Disk Management shows RAW, or Not Initialized | Since Windows can't read the partition layout, it will offer a wipe of the drive | No, do not accept this: initialising wipes the drive clean |
| Windows says a USB device attached to this computer has malfunctioned | Either the power rail in the caddy or bridge has failed | Boards fail much more often than disks |
Nothing is chargeable until you say yes. Every item gets a case number of its own immediately upon receipt, an engineer determines what has failed, and you get a clear picture of which files have a real possibility of being recovered. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down and does not cost anything.
The first question is whether the failure was in the enclosure or in the disk. A great many "dead" externals (including LaCie and Iomega) have a perfectly functional disk inside but bad electronics.
Where encryption occurs makes more difference than whether you chose it. Most externals do their encryption in the bridge, so the key goes across with the board, not the disk. Once the key is lifted off the board, unreadable sectors become named folders.
Hardware image tools create a sector-level copy before rebuilding your folder structure from that copy alone. That rebuild then returns to you on new media, at our cost.
You don't get charged anything until you've confirmed and authorised that everything is fine after seeing the entire list of what was recovered. Any recovered items are returned via brand-new storage media and the postage costs for these are covered by us. We do not consider a project complete here until we receive confirmation that you have been able to successfully access and review every item you received back.
Worth knowing: SanDisk’s 2TB and 4TB Extreme portable drives lost files without any advance notice through 2023; the users’ complaints turned into a US class action lawsuit against Western Digital, and a firmware upgrade released during the dispute settled nothing. If your unit is malfunctioning, get it imaged straight away.
Nine days before the deadline for completion, the drive started ticking. We swapped in a donor head assembly, took the image using a very slow setting and pulled the encryption keys from the bridge board. The thesis went back complete and on time (including references), and there were seven days left until the due date.
No. First get a price quote, then send the entire thing, including the broken case, along with the USB cable and any power supply. Many external drives encrypt data on the USB bridge circuitry, not on the actual disk, so if you don't have this board, a good hard drive will read as nothing but static noise.
Under no circumstances. It will tell you that there are structural problems with your filesystem and provide no information about the contents of your files. If you accept it, you'll be destroying the very structures upon which a restore/rebuild would rely.
Travelling by post is particularly harsh: in addition to physical shocks from movement during transit, it also involves handling, and extreme temperature fluctuations. For a drive that has been nearing the end of its useful life when it travels, failure can occur immediately after powering up. This occurs frequently.
Most of the time. What ultimately determines whether the data can be read is not the external drive shell itself, but rather the overall condition of the disk inside, the state of its own electronics, and whether the bridge chip still retains enough functionality (enough "life" left in it) to give back its keys.
Every additional power-up asks for even more of a drive that is already starting to fail. First open a case with us, and let the free diagnosis tell you how much remains.