Plug-in drives · job log · ADR-2025-3475
Very Loud, and Then Not on the List at All.
The noise arrived first. His Touro S began making very loud spinning noises
— not a click and not a knock, but something turning under load. Then the drive was no longer accessible as a drive when plugged in
, and that was that. About 500GB sat on it. Roughly 300GB of that had been backed up to another drive a good few years back
, which left the remainder exposed: his files from approx 2017-2019 weren't back up
, and those were the ones he asked about first, last and in between. He had already bought a 2TB SSD to put the recovery onto. What he wanted from us was a straight answer on whether the newer two hundred gigabytes could be reached before the mechanism stopped for good.
Same story on yours? Tell us what it does — the look is free.
0203 0868633
What failed, and why.
Two things move in a hard drive: the discs, which turn on one bearing at a fixed rate, and the arm carrying the heads across them. A loud spin belongs to the first of those. Bearings wear, lubricant thins, and a spindle that has begun to labour makes precisely the sound he described — steady rather than intermittent, and louder than it was last month. That the drive then stopped presenting itself is the same story one step further on. No drive offers an interface until it has reached speed and settled, so a motor that cannot hold that speed never arrives at the part where it introduces itself. This matters more than a click because the noise does not stop by itself. Every hour of power is more wear on the one part that has to keep turning before anything at all can be read, and past a certain point no amount of care gets it back. Switching off is the whole of the first aid.
What the bench did with it.
The order of the job →| Equipment used | Its work on this job | The reason for it |
|---|---|---|
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Firmware and defect tables read out first, then the passes ordered head by head | Works with the drive's firmware and controller directly rather than around them |
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | The newest regions were copied first, then the remainder, one surface to a pass | Heads mapped first, then one platter side to a pass, with every reset, every timeout and the power itself kept under our own control |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Folder tree rebuilt from the copy, and the 2017 to 2019 files taken out | Opens APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs when other software will not |
What the bench did with it.
What the noise turned out to be
Filtered air, lid off, and the spindle was the first thing looked at. It turned, but not freely: the bearing had worn to the point where the platters were no longer running true, and that is the whole of the noise. Heads were graded under the microscope before any other decision, because a spindle running out of true carries heads across the surfaces at the wrong height, and what that has already cost is a question of surface condition rather than of opinion.
Take the files he named before the rest
He had been clear from his first message about which material mattered, and on a mechanism like this one that ordering is not a courtesy — it is the method. The 2017 to 2019 files were located in the imaging plan first and read first, at the point where the drive was at its most willing. The older regions, the ones he already held a copy of, waited at the end of the queue, where the risk of a run stopping belonged.
One run, and then it stays switched off
There was one run and there was no second one. Sound areas crossed at full rate; the awkward bands were kept until last and given a fixed number of attempts each rather than an open-ended one, so no bad patch could hold the machine on a labouring drive for hours. When the run finished the Touro left the bench and stayed off it.
What went home.
The 2017 to 2019 files are back, and they went onto the SSD he had bought for them. Older material — the part he already held elsewhere — crossed as well, though not the whole of it, since the last regions read were the ones the plan had put last. Whatever failed to answer appears by name in the report; no percentage is used anywhere in it. The Touro is finished. A worn spindle will wear again, and a drive in that state has no second life as a backup.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Further portable-drive jobs, written up.
Yours doing something similar? Power it down first.
Prices are published and fixed. Memory cards and USB sticks are priced at £250 + VAT. A drive on its own comes to £300 + VAT. Anything holding a second disk, whether RAID, NAS or a server, opens at £500 + VAT. The first look costs nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed and in writing before a penny is charged. Switch it off and post it in. Most jobs carry no fee where no files return.