It's grimly reliable: the external drive holding the only copy is the one that slides off the desk. Whether yours clicks, beeps, blinks or does nothing at all, we recover portable and desktop USB drives of every brand for Swansea — think of us as the backup drive's backup plan.
Free diagnostic on every external drive job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every external drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
The definitive portable-drive death — heads down onto platters, and every retry gambles more of them.
Bridge, electronics or firmware failure; the disk is alive but incommunicado.
Yanked cables and mid-write unplugs corrupt the table; the files below the error are fine.
Stuck heads or a straining motor — disconnect it and don't try again.
Dead electronics or bridge — imaged through, or worked around, the original board.
Passport and Elements boards are part of the cipher; swap the enclosure and you see noise, not files.
Desktop externals go down with their mains bricks — frequently the cheapest failure on the menu, occasionally the fiddliest.
Spreading bad sectors turn transfers to treacle; hardware imagers get ahead of the decay.
Formats and deletions on externals recover well when the drive is parked immediately.
Platters tolerate far more than owners expect — treated and transplanted in the clean bench.
Seagate's slim STEA / STKM portables click after knocks — donor heads come from stock.
LaCie STFR Ruggeds ride in camera bags until one knock too many — orange bumper, standard rescue.
Toshiba Canvio micro-B sockets loosen after years of plugging — reflowed or bypassed for imaging.
T5s, T7s and SanDisk Extremes fail electronically without warning — flash-bench cases in a drive's clothing.
Years of mid-write unplugs corrupt the catalog cumulatively until the volume won't mount — rebuilt from a full image.
Portables get carried, crushed, yanked mid-write and parked on the edge of desks — and a spinning drive that hits the floor usually lands heads-first, hence the classic post-drop clicking. My Passport and Elements drives from WD, Seagate's Expansion and One Touch, Toshiba's Canvio, LaCie Ruggeds, Buffalo MiniStations: all daily visitors, on a bench where external HDD recovery is the main event rather than a sideline. Inside the plastic is a hard drive, and everything our drive lab can do applies to it.
On many modern portables — WD above all — the USB bridge board is a component of the encryption, silently scrambling everything written to the platters. Shuck the drive, cable it to SATA, and you'll see noise, not files; countless DIY attempts stop right there in a panic. It's expected behaviour, and routine for us: recovery runs through the original bridge or reconstructs its cipher chain, and your folder tree comes back exactly as you left it.
An external is a hard drive in a jacket, so the whole drive bench applies — plus the bridge kit:
Firmware-level access to drives in manufacturer service mode — translator repairs, defect remapping and locked service areas opened on the industry-standard bench.
Unstable drives are captured head by head with current monitoring, adaptive timeouts and retry logic that software imagers simply don't have.
Class-100 filtered air for any job where a drive is opened — head stacks and platters are only ever handled under this airflow.
Purpose-made combs, lifters and alignment jigs move head assemblies and complete platter packs between chassis without a single touch-down.
An indexed stock of donor drives spanning model, firmware family and site code, so the matching head stack or board is on the shelf rather than on back-order.
WD's self-encrypting portables and other SED enclosures are imaged through their original bridge — or decrypted around it.
Replacement bridge boards come from our own stock, matched so the encryption chain on the drive survives the swap intact.
The WDBYVG-generation Passports and STEA Expansions above are, by sheer volume, the most-recovered devices in the building, with portable SSDs like the T7 climbing fast behind them. WD's hardware encryption lives on the USB bridge, so a failed board needs its cipher chain preserved rather than a caddy swap; Seagate's slim portables click after knocks; and the mains-powered desktops routinely outlive their own power bricks.
Iomega vanished from the market years ago, but its eGo, Home Media and GDHDU-series externals are still turning up with family archives locked inside — and with no manufacturer left to turn to. The drives inside are standard mechanisms wearing a discontinued badge, so imaging and recovery proceed exactly as they would for any portable drive of that era.
A LaCie earns its living on the move — STFR-series Ruggeds living in camera bags, d2 units beneath edit desks, Porsche Design drives on studio shelves — and the moving is what finishes them: a bag set down hard mid-spin costs a Rugged its heads, while the desktop ranges lose their Thunderbolt or USB-C bridge electronics far more often than the disk behind them. The brand was folded into Seagate years ago, leaving no factory repair channel, which means a dead LaCie's only road home runs through a lab like this one. Photographers and video editors around Swansea Bay keep us supplied: we open the shell, image the bare disk — fitting donor heads first when the fall calls for it — and return the projects from that image.
Treat a My Passport as one sealed system rather than a drive in a caddy: the USB port is mounted on the drive's own controller PCB and hardware encryption runs on the same silicon, so failed electronics leave your files locked behind them, and a DIY move into a spare enclosure shows static where folders should be. Donor boards for the WDBYVG and WDBPKJ generations are held here, and carrying the cipher chain across intact is exactly what separates an 'undetected' Passport from a readable one. The mains-fed My Books contribute a different failure list — dead power bricks and burnt bridges — usually wrapped around a perfectly healthy drive.
MiniStation portables — the HD-PCF line especially — collect the classic 2.5-inch wounds: falls, loosened micro-USB sockets, bad sectors on the march. The DriveStation desktops fail differently, generally surviving their own power supplies and interface boards rather than the other way round. Certain MiniStations encrypt in hardware too; given your password, that layer is unlocked during recovery so what returns is files, not cipher-noise. Whichever variant arrives, the path here is identical — shell off, a complete sector image, then an ordinary drive recovery from there.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
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Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.